


love is universal

by youheldyourbreath



Category: Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: F/M, Reincarnation AU, and in every life mj doesn't remember him, earn your happy ending kids, in every life we kill peter parker
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-20
Updated: 2018-01-03
Packaged: 2019-02-04 20:38:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 33,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12779061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youheldyourbreath/pseuds/youheldyourbreath
Summary: love is universal. it spans time and distance. and sometimes, on the rare occasion that love doesn’t quite get it right the first, love spans for more than one lifetime. this is that story.in their first life they are called Femi and Marcus. in their last they are called Peter and MJ.





	1. femi and marcus

“Puella,” she heard the angry Roman soldier snap at her from across the road. There was an unnatural lilt to Latin words, one that sounded less like language and more like barked orders, and even though Rome had occupied Egypt for the last ten years she knew she would never grow accustomed to the accent. It was as hard and militaristic as the men that occupied her family’s land.

She barely remembered a time before Rome ruled Egypt so completely. She was five when Cleopatra died and with their dignified ruler went the Egyptian way of life. There was no kindness or culture to the Roman legion. Their soldiers were conquerors and villains. They burned villages to the ground, destroyed homes and families and she hated them.

The solider barred his teeth and spoke again, “Puella. Hic veni.”

She cast her eyes up and met the cold gaze of the Roman solider. “Scientiam linguam latinam non habeo,” she mumbled. Her excuse was always that she did not speak Latin, a murky lie at best.

The soldier seemed to glean this and drew his staff stepping toward her. The girl did not blink, she did not move, she did not breathe. She knew what happened when these soulless soldiers lost their tempers and the smartest way to avoid being beaten to death would be her silence.

The solider raised his staff, aimed to strike, but the blow never came. A different solider, dressed in a vibrant red tunic, sidestepped her and caught the staff mid-swing. He flinched from the impact of the staff on his bare hand but he did not budge. The whole street seemed to slow and watch this moment. A Roman versus a Roman, a sight as ridiculous and unlikely as the rivers running blood.

The solider that tried to assault her said something in a dialect of Latin she had never heard before. It sounded, if possible, more brutal and choppy than the Latin her ears had grown used to over the last ten years. The second man seemed bored at best by the first man’s outburst. He said something easily offensive, she did not need to know the words to know that tone. They went back and forth speaking in frantic Latin, each word more heated than the last.

Until the solider in red smiled sloppily at his comrade and released his staff. The other man looked furious but inclined his head in a careless bow and stalked off.

The man with the sloppy smile turned around and looked at her more seriously than he had taken the other man. In perfect Egyptian, he asked, “Are you alright, miss?”

She blinked in surprise and then, suspiciously, narrowed her eyes, “Yes?”

He did not look convinced, “I apologize. He’s a brute.”

“All Romans are brutes,” she hissed. And he seemed as surprised to hear that as she was to have said it. Her eyes widened and she quickly tried to rectify the situation, “I mean-”

“I know what you meant,” he spoke over her but not unkindly, “I know what you Egyptians think of us. If I were in your position I’m not sure I wouldn’t feel the same.”

“I-” she fumbled, stunned.

“Marcus!” A Roman called out, stepping out of a silk shop, “Marcus! Ubi fuisti?”

On instinct, the girl made her shoulders drop, trying to look as small as possible, to fade into the background of these Roman murderers. But she could not help her curiosity, she turned her chin to the left to look at the man running briskly over to them.

He was tall, lean and had the angry, sharp look of a Roman dignitary. He held himself like a man in power and was easily fifteen years Marcus’ senior. “Gaius Antonius!” The two men embraced in a familiar hug. As they were distracted, she plotted her escape, taking a few steps back. But the man, Marcus, caught her eye and unwound himself from the hug, “Gaius, please meet my Egyptian friend.” He opened his mouth to say more but faltered. “I’m sorry,” he shot her the same goofy smile he had aimed at her assailant earlier, “I don’t know your name.”

It felt like a trap, but stuck between two Romans she had no choice but to be congenial. “Femi,” the girl offered.

“Femi,” he repeated. The way his words curled around her name gave her pause. The kept each other’s gaze a beat too long before Marcus cleared his throat and turned back to his friend, “This is Femi. Femi this is Gaius Antonius. The Primus Pilus of the Aegyptus legion.”

Gaius looked down his nose at Femi and she felt a hot flare of embarrassment and anger. She was not like the dirt beneath his sandals. In that moment, Femi hated the Romans more, if possible. “Yes,” Gaius said in stilted Egyptian, like he had barely tried to learn her language, “I did not know you kept such pretty friends, Marcus.” The meaning was not lost on her.

She knew what kind of friendship Roman officers extended to Egyptian girls.

Marcus’ jaw clicked and if Femi were not so close she would have missed it. His expressions were spectacularly schooled, “On the contrary, we’ve only just met today.”

“How quick you are,” Gaius joked, his laughter loud and bombastic. The loathsome man slid his eyes over Femi and she forced herself to straighten her spine and keep whatever dignified grace she could manage, “She is quite pretty. For an Egyptian.”

“That is quite enough, Gaius,” Marcus smiled tightly.

Femi felt the eyes of every Egyptian standing in the street and she wanted to bury her head in the sand and never come up for air again. She gathered some strength and asked, “Excuse me, sir, may I go?”

Gaius snarled, “How dare you speak to a Roman Centurion without being addressed, you vile, little-”

“Gaius,” Marcus cleared his throat, “I’d ask you don’t speak to her like that. I like her pretty.”

Femi’s eyes widened and her head snapped at Marcus. She was no fool. She did not really expect much from a Roman soldier but this Marcus had seemed slightly more human than the rest. Anger pooled in her stomach at being wrong.

She tried to meet his eyes but he would not look at her, which only served to make her angrier. Gaius seemed pleased by Marcus’ words, “Yes, well, don’t let me keep you, Marcus. You _are_ only young once.”

And the world slowed. She knew what was going to come next before it even came. She knew she would be dragged off, like cattle, to some Roman tent and be taken by this barbarian centurion. Marcus’ hand grabbed her wrist and tugged her close. She felt his hand lay suspiciously low on her waist and she squeaked in protest.

“Gaius,” Marcus inclined his head in a show of respect. And then, he was dragging Femi away from the crowds and back toward the Roman barracks. He was high-ranking enough, it seemed, that she would at least be defiled in a home, in his bed, as he sidestepped the regular Roman tents.

She felt eyes on her everywhere and she wanted to fight back but fear held her tongue. There were too many Romans around to get away safely. She would either submit or die. Neither seemed like a particularly attractive option.

Marcus tugged her inside a small home and closed the door behind them. “Look, I-” he began and Femi panicked. She flailed her arm out and punched him square in the nose. Marcus doubled over from the pain and began to curse in that same Latin dialect that was foreign to her earlier.

She covered her mouth, surprise shaking her down to her bones. And then, she steeled herself. She would not roll over and allow any man, especially some Roman, to take her without her consent. All she had to do was attack him again and then she could escape at nightfall with him unconscious and the cover dark.

He snapped his head up and she aimed to strike again but he grabbed for her arms. She tried to wriggle free but he was too strong and, just like a trapped animal, she began to panic. Her eyes were wide in terror and his nose was bleeding freely. She must have broken it.

“Gods be good,” he yelped, “I’m not going to hurt you! Calm down!”

She did not.

So, Marcus backed her into the wall and spat a patch of blood on the floor. “Femi,” he said her name gently, “Femi, breathe with me.” Her blood pressure spiked. “Femi,” he repeated, “You have to breathe with me. It’s okay. In and out. In and out.”

She shuttered out a breath and then, sucked another one in. Over and over it went until she was finally calm enough that the ringing in her ears subsided. Femi looked at Marcus and, remarkably, he was looking back.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he finally said.

With the strength she had, she pushed him off of her, “Then why drag me back here?”

He sighed and grabbed for a white cloth to staunch the bleeding from his nose, “Gaius. He’s a superior officer. He’s _the_ superior officer in Aegyptus.”

“Egypt,” she corrected him.

“Sorry,” he smiled, softly, “Egypt.” He tried to dampen his smile, she could tell, but it only served to make it bigger. Like she amused him.

She scowled, “Don’t look at me like that.”

“I’m sorry,” he grinned unabashedly, “You’re not afraid of me, are you?”

“On the contrary,” she lifted her chin, “I’m terrified.”

“You’re very brave, then,” he hummed.

“Don’t flatter me,” she snapped, “Why did you bring me back here?”

“Gaius likes pretty Egyptian girls,” he said bluntly. “But he respects me. Our families are old friends. If he thought you were mine…” he flushed at those words, “…you’d be safe.”

Femi faltered, “And why do you care if I’m safe?”

He eyes hardened, “Because nobody deserves to be beaten or raped.”

“Not even Egyptians?” she countered.

“Nobody,” he said more fiercely.

Femi grumbled, “I’m sorry about your nose.”

He lightened, “It’ll heal.”

“I should go,” she glanced at the door.

But Marcus stepped in front of it. “You have to wait until nightfall. The other soldiers won’t respect my claim as much as Gaius does.”

“Your claim?” she shrieked, pounding on his chest for good measure.

He grabbed her wrists, trying to stop her from hurting him further, “Please. Stop hitting me. You’re taller than I am and it hurts.”

She brushed some wild hair out of her face, “You have no claim to me.”

“I know,” he said and his tone was peculiar and almost sad. “But I’m trying to keep you safe. You think you know the Romans. You don’t. Whatever thoughts you’ve had about us, I can guarantee, we’re ten times worse. We did not conquer half the known world by being good men.”

And Femi believed him. She glanced at the door, considering what demons lay beyond it, and decided to stop fighting. Nightfall was only a few hours away. She could risk the night. She could wait until she was safe. Femi turned to Marcus and asked, “Are you a good man?”

A shadow flickered across his face. He was suddenly Atlas with the world laying squarely on his shoulders. He was too young to be so burdened. He tossed the bloody rag away, “No.”

The hours passed in silence after his admission. Femi shared a house with a bad man and waited and prayed for nightfall. But Marcus did not push her to speak to him or do anything she did not wish to do.

Instead, he offered her food and wine and sat in a chair by the fire pouring over letters. He gave her free reign of his little house and she began to look through it like a curious child. He had so many books and so many beautiful trinkets. On the side of his bed was a small portrait of a woman. The colors from the paint were fading and the portrait was chipped from overuse. Like he had poured over it for hours and hours.

The sun was setting in the window in his bedroom. And the room was drenched in sad, orange light. She heard Marcus’ steps before she saw him. She turned around and lifted the portrait. Sadness overwhelmed his face and she could not help but ask, “Who is she?”

“My mother,” he crossed to her and took the portrait from her hand. His thumb caressed the worn image and he placed it back beside his bed.

“Is she back in Rome?” Femi inquired.

Marcus shook his head, “No. She died. When I was eight.”

“I’m sorry,” she said automatically. And they were both surprised to sense that she meant it.

Marcus sat on the edge of his bed and Femi, awkwardly, joined him. He turned his boyish features on her and asked innocently, “Femi is a pretty name. What does it mean?”

Perhaps it was the light, the sad and orange beseeching mood that it cast over the two of them, or perhaps it was the honesty in the planes of his face that made her answer softly, “Love. It means love.” He did not seem surprised by this cosmic joke. “What does Marcus mean?”

His lips quirked up in a sardonic smile, “War. Marcus means war. What a pair we are. Love and War.”

Femi shook her head, “We aren’t a pair.”

His eyebrow raised in childish wonder, “Aren’t we?”

The orange shadows of the sunset gave way to the blues of darkness on Marcus’ face. Night felt like a safety blanket. She had a vague memory of when the Romans first invaded Egypt. She remembered how there was no shelter from fire for weeks as they burned her city to the ground. All she saw was the reds of death until one day the burning was done and the darkness took over the sky again. Femi remembered how relieved she was to sit in the darkness, how it felt like magic.

This felt like that magic but there was a snap of tension bubbling on the surface of this moment that did not exist for her as a child. Marcus swallowed thickly, “You should go.”

“What if I don’t want to?” she asked, boldly.

“I’m a bad man, Femi,” he whispered, his face drawing closer to hers with every second the darkness wrapped around them. “I’m a Roman centurion. You’re an Egyptian.”

“I know,” she did not pull away.

His eyes flickered down to her parting lips, “We shouldn’t.”

For all of his talk, Marcus closed the gap between them first. Their lips found each other’s like ships that pass in the night: unexpectedly. She gasped into his mouth and Marcus sighed into the fullness of hers. It welcomed him and she writhed at the feelings swirling around them.

She fell back onto his strange Roman bed and blindly searched for the clips of his tunic. His own hands worked on her flimsy cloak. Between kisses and rough hands, he spoke, “We should stop.”

Femi would nod and grip at him again, dragging him back down to her.

It happened madly and desperately and when they found each other in the shadows of night, Femi gasped. Marcus found her hand and she held it tight. Her sighs mingled with his breathing and night kept them safe.

When sunshine peaked into his room, Femi woke with her hair cascaded lazily on his chest. There was a flood of shame at her actions until Marcus turned his sleepy eyes down on her and smiled. That same horribly sloppy smile he had fixed on her yesterday. She hid her face in his chest and rumbled a laugh there.

“Good morning,” he brushed her hair back from her face.

“I should go,” she kissed his chest.

Marcus rolled over on top of her and kissed her nose, “Stay.”

She brushed her nose against his and ran her tired hands up and down his back, “I’ve already stayed too long.”

He did not seem to like it but he nodded, acquiescing. He untangled himself from her and she stood to dress. Slowly. She was too distracted as he kissed easy kisses onto her spine. His voice still rough with sleep asked, “When will I see you again?”

She turned to look at him over her shoulder and he stole a kiss. Femi shook her head, “Not again.”

“Yes, again,” he frowned, slipping behind her to wrap his arms around her middle. She leaned back against his chest and took a deep breath. “Love, please,” he squeezed her.

“Love?” she rolled her eyes.

“That is your name, isn’t it?” he whispered in her ear.

She shivered, “And what should I call you, then? War?”

He nipped at her earlobe, “If you like.”

An echo of the future tickled in her ear, _I have to go, Peter_. So she said, “I have to go, Marcus.”

Reluctantly, he let her go. They dressed together and, when they were done, Marcus pulled her into his arms for one final kiss. It edged on heat until two loud thumps sounded at his door.

They sprang apart and Marcus adjusted his tunic before answering. Femi stood sheepishly just behind him.

Gaius stood in the doorway and seemed both pleased and surprised to see her there. Femi resisted the urge to scowl. “Marcus,” Gaius crowed, “I hate to take you away from morning pleasures.”

“What is it, Gaius?” Marcus said almost too sharply.

“Those stupid Germanic tribes have risen up. We’re being called.”

“We’re leaving Egypt?” Marcus blanched.

Femi tried to feign delight at this news. Less Roman soldiers was always better. And she had only just met Marcus. There would be other men, better men, Egyptian men to fill her time. But she could not help the plummeting feeling of panic settling in her stomach.

Gaius preened, “Not to worry, Marcus. You can always take the girl with you.”

Marcus rubbed his eyes, pointedly ignoring that suggestion, “I have to pack. When do we leave?”

“Immediately. Apparently the defeat has been bad.” Gaius sneered at Femi’s flimsy cloak, “And clean your girl up. I won’t have her leaving camp like that, distracting the men.”

Marcus nodded in that tense, half-incline way she always saw the Romans do. And, as quickly as he arrived, Gaius was gone.

“You don’t have to go,” Femi immediately said.

Marcus tossed one of his heavier tunics to her to dress in. She began to wrap it and clip it down. He scoffed, “I’m a Roman centurion. That’s my job. To go when duty calls.”

“Romans have no duty. No honor. You owe them nothing.”

“I owe them everything!” Marcus looked incredulously at her. “I am Roman.”

“You said,” she fumbled, searching for purchase, “You said yesterday that you would hate the Romans too if you were Egyptian.”

“But I’m not,” he closed his trunk, “am I?”

Another whisper from the future surged between them:

_You’re not an Avenger, Peter. You don’t owe them a damn thing._

_But I am Spider-man. And that means I have to go._

Femi blinked, “I can’t believe I ever let you touch me.”

He whirled on her, “What would you have me do?”

“Not fight!” she yelled. “For once in your stupid, Roman life do the right thing.”

“I’m a soldier. That’s who I am. That’s who I’ll always be. When the call to fight comes….I will always, ALWAYS, answer it.” Those words breathe prophecy. A strange sort-of magic pulsed in the room. She knew, for some unknown reason, that he would always pick war. His name was Marcus, after all.

She swallowed, making her heart stone and spat crudely at his feet. His face faltered and his hand twitched for her, to reach out, perhaps even hug her, but he remained dutifully still. So she picked her wounded ego up from off the ground and marched out of his little house.

Femi made it five steps before Marcus ran after her, grabbing her arm to stop her in her tracks, “Femi, please.”

She shrugged him off, eyes fierce and fire, “You must go where you are needed, soldier.”

He languished for only a moment before he adopted that damnable, carefully crafted Roman warrior mask. He nodded respectfully. And, as she watched him walk away and something in her screamed to stop him. If he goes, something terrible will come to pass. She knew it. As she knew, in that moment, it would be the last time she ever saw him.

Months later, when he died on the battlefield in the Germanic countryside, she felt it. It ripped through her in agony. She was not sure how. But it startled her on her way home from the river. The bowl of water she was carrying shattered on the ground. A cry yelped free. Women swarmed to help her but she hazily pushed them all away.

She cannot breathe. Her chest was caving in from the sheer loss that was pounding in her veins.

A wise woman in her village, the Romans sneered and called her a witch, watched on as Femi fell to her knees, as she covered her ears. She could feel his pain. She could feel the last beats of Marcus’ heart in her own chest. She somehow knew the last thought he had was of her sitting on his bed drenched in moonlight.

The wise woman picked Femi up from off of her feet and began to guide her away from the thickening crowd. People part for the wise woman without question. When they were safe from watchful eyes, she forced water into Femi’s hand and she guzzled it down like it would help soften the blow. It did nothing.

Only then did Femi start to cry. And the wise woman waited. She waited for the sobs to crest and fall and despair to settle. She waited until there was nothing but a hallow calm to speak, “Do not fret, my child. You will see him again.”

Femi’s red rimmed eyes looked up at the woman with the soft, imploring features, “H-how do you….?”

“It will not be for many, many years,” the old woman continued, “and you will know him by a different name, but you will see him again.”

“Witch craft,” Femi whispered.

“And he will die,” the old woman said bluntly, “In every life. Until you save him. Or so the cycle will repeat.”

The wheels begin turning, then. And fate makes her wait until the next life to see him again.


	2. loreley and william

Master William Shakespeare was a true artist. Loreley always found herself positively and completely moved by his plays. Whenever a new one would arrive at the local theatre, she begged her father to give her leave to go into town. It often felt like the weeks dragged on until the traveling acting troop from London visited to perform Master Shakespeare's newest masterpieces. Her father remarked that it was trivial but never denied her, so long as her lady’s maid was at her side.

It was during his latest play, Julius Caesar, that Loreley felt a set of eyes watching her from across the theatre. It was an intense stare that prickled the back of her neck. She did not dare glance at the offending admirer, as it would be unbefitting a woman of her station. But, when she was feeling particularly bold, she easily slid her gaze across the crowd to find the person watching her.

By the end of the play, her back was rigid and straight with agitation, which only served to amuse her lady’s maid. Loreley stalked down the steps of the theatre onto the muddy ground as everyone filed out of the theatre and, much to her surprise, a young gentleman fell into step with the two traveling ladies.

He was short and unremarkable in almost every way but she kept glancing at him as they walked in silence among the crowd of theatre goers. Finally, she tipped over into fury, “May I help you, sir?”

He seemed outrageously thrilled that she was addressing him at all, “Pardon me, miss, but I could not help but notice you across the way during the play.”

She clicked her tongue, pleased that she had solved the mystery on who had been staring at her from across the way the entire evening, “Of course. Well, eyes were made for looking…but perhaps you can find a more handsome target.”

“More handsome than you?” he scoffed under his breath.

“Lady Loreley,” her lady’s maid pipped up on her behalf, “Her name is Loreley, sir.”

“Loreley?” he smiled, his teeth were uneven and ugly but his smile was blindingly beautiful. “Like the siren that lures men to their death?”

“I believe she was a deeply misunderstood mythological creature, sir,” Loreley hummed defiantly.

The young man with the ink stained hands, the mark of one of those new aged writers, grinned impossibly wide, “Master William suits me fine, Miss Loreley.” She rolled her eyes at his failed attempts of charm, which only served to make him more gleeful, “Forgive me, Miss Loreley, but have we met before?”

“Not that I can recall,” she said sharply.

He nodded his head, visibly disgruntled, anxiously rubbing his fingers together to try and remove a fraction of the dirt she seemed so disgusted by, “Of course. As it is, miss, I think I’d remember meeting you.”

Her heart fluttered at his ridiculous sentiment and Loreley, for the first time, looked Master William dead in the eyes. There, she saw a memory, or the fragment of a memory hidden in them. If she squinted, she could almost see a soldier standing rigidly in a line of steel and she could hear the drums of war. Loreley shook her head of the notion. It was her heartbeat, she repeated in her head, that racing feeling.

William looked back at her, his eyes beseeching and large. Without much ceremony, he blurted out, “Would you come to my play tomorrow? I am no Master Shakespeare, but…it would do me great honor to have you here.”

“My father will be expecting me,” she lied. The lie caught in her throat like a bad taste.

He smiled indulgently at her, like he could tell she was concealing the truth, and it made her insides drop with shame. Master William was a perfectly respectable gentleman, for a writer, and she was no lady herself. Though her father was a lord she was a known bastard. Her rank was as murky as her parentage. Everyone in court thought as much and, if they did not, her skin color gave them pause. While the fashion was milky white skin, she was not. Further proof of her father’s indiscretions.

Her father’s wife always sneered and snidely remarked that she was lucky that her father even acknowledged her at all. Vile, little-

(Those words followed her from life to life).

Yet, Master William was not looking at her like the bastard, colored child of some lord. She was a beautiful lady and he was delighted to be in her presence.

Loreley sighed and said graciously, “I’ve just recalled, my father is out of town this week. I would be happy to attend.” His brilliant, crooked smile warmed her insides and she stomped those feelings down. She rolled her eyes to stop from looking too taken with him, “And what is this grand opus you’ve written, Master William?”

He leaned in to her like it was some grand secret, and she loathed how charmed she was by the simple action, and whispered, “An epic tale of forbidden love.”

She raised an eyebrow, her interest peaked, “Forbidden love? Like Romeo and Juliet.”

“Less fine than Master Shakespeare’s work, I assure you,” he joked. And then his face shaded more seriously, like his story was the dearest to his heart, like he had even lived it. “It’s set in Ancient Egypt. A Roman centurion and an Egyptian maiden. And he loves her desperately.”

He looked at her like he was expecting her to have some reaction, or remember something. Like he knew her.

She sighed, “Sounds tragic.”

Master William’s entire demeanor shifted, then. He glowered and shut his eyes, for only a minute, before his happy, upbeat personality shone through, again. Loreley chewed on the inside of her mouth, “Until tomorrow, Master William.”

“Until tomorrow, Femi,” he whispered just loud enough that she had to strain to hear him.

Her back shuttered with some strange sensation. She narrowed her eyes at him, skeptical of everything this writer was and what he expected of her, “What did you say?”

“Until tomorrow, mon ami.” His eyes revealed only half-truths and hundreds of secrets and Loreley stared at him for a beat too long to be proper for a lady, but as her father’s wife was always reminding her Loreley was hardly a lady. She ducked her head in a mock goodbye and scurried off with her lady’s maid back to the town square to pick up the few items she was sent to retrieve.

When she returned home, her father’s wife was sitting by the fire in all of her finery. Loreley kept her eyes down on the floor to avoid any confrontation and her lady’s maid, Margaret, guided her out of the parlor and back to the kitchen. There, the two women began to unpack their small baskets.

Margaret glanced over at Loreley several times before Loreley finally snapped, “What is it, Margaret?”

“Master William, he’s a fine gentleman, ain’t he, miss?” Margaret playfully probed.

Loreley looked down in her basket searching for the words that would get her lady’s maid to move on from such subjects but she remembered the heat of Master William’s eyes and the way he had stared at her longing for some kind of answer to a question he had been asking for his entire life. It was the familiarity of his doe eyes that scared her and the way he spoke about his latest play.

She was certain he was teasing her and she hated not knowing why.

“That’s enough, Margaret,” Loreley squeaked, which only served to make her lady’s maid giggle.

Loreley was happy to steal away under her covers for the night, after. In her bed, the small wooden disaster that she had outgrown several years before, she stared up at the ceiling and tried to block out the rustling of the wind battering at her window like a howling wolf.

She liked Ancient Egypt, was the last thought that floated in her consciousness before she drifted into a dreamless sleep.

The next morning she woke and dressed for the play. Going down to the center of town was always unwelcome. It was grimy and dirty and dangerous in a way that the countryside never quite managed to be and she felt safer in the countryside. Like, everyone knew her. Like, no one was going to stare at her skin and curse at her in the streets.

She pulled her hood up around herself to hide her features as best as possible. Anonymity was safe and comfortable. With Margaret at her side, the two women made the trek back to town for the second day in a row. It was just as loud and boisterous as it had been the day before, only this time Loreley could scarcely concentrate on her surroundings. Each step she took closer to the theatre, the louder the buzzing in her arms became; until, finally, the stepped into the round and the world of sensation rushed back to her all at once.

Loreley did not have to stand down in the pits with the rest of the commoners, but she was not deemed well enough to be in the highest seats with the other ladies. As a bastard, she was relegated to the seats just above the ground, but she was led to a seat closest to the stage so she would not have to struggle to hear Master William’s words.

The crowd was rambunctious. Until a man with two pots came out on stage and slammed them together over and over again, “Alright, you lot. SHUT IT! The play’s about to start.” The crowd whooped and cheered and the man only rolled his eyes, “Animals. All of ya.”

Loreley smiled to herself at the energy of the theatre and, then, the play began. For the first two acts, the story centered around a young centurion, Marcus. He was brave and kind and a good, loyal Roman in Roman occupied Egypt. His friends were brash and fun and made the crowd whoop with each inappropriate joke.

Then, the third act came and it was then Marcus saw a young woman across the stage. An Egyptian maiden, the one Master William had told her about, and the mood of the play shifted completely. It turned into a sweeping romance that only lasted a day. The entirety of the fourth act was the pair of them alone in his small cottage, talking about the world. And he called her love and she called him war.

The hair on the back of Loreley’s neck stood up and she remembered Master William’s joke from the day before: _Loreley? Like the siren that lures men to their death_?

Names, she thought, have a certain power.

And, as she had feared, they did not have a happy ending. He went away to war and died without ever seeing his precious Femi again.

Loreley could feel the tears dripping sorrowfully down her face. And she craned her head to see the man standing just off stage, watching her every reaction. Master William. She was not sure how long he had been there, watching her, but it felt, from the way he was staring, like it had been a long time.

When the play was over the audience unenthusiastically clapped and as she filed out of her seat, she heard Margaret mumble under her breath, “Not quite as romantic as Master Shakespeare, is he?”

Loreley shook her head, “It was wonderful.”

Margaret clicked her tongue, “If you say so, miss.”

Master William turned the corner, then, and his face was critically serious. Margaret looked between the pair of them and quipped, “Oops, silly me, miss. I’ve gone and left my things back in the theatre. I’ll meet you home, shall I? No need to wait up.”

Loreley shot her lady’s maid an unimpressed look but Master William looked thankful for the privacy. He bowed, “I’ll see to it that she makes her way home.”

“Ain’t you kind, sir,” Margaret dripped mischief.

The pair of them walked in steady silence for several minutes after Margaret departed until Loreley could not help but remark, “It was beautiful.”

Master William looked surprised to hear her speak and blinked in her direction, “Oh?”

She nodded, “Yes. Beautiful. It was so sad.”

“Yes,” Master William nodded, “Yes, it was.”

Loreley raised her eyebrow at him in that same confused manner she was growing accustomed to doing around him. He was always speaking in riddles and looking at her like she was smart enough to understand. She was not. Whatever code he spoke in, she did not have the key. “What do you mean by that, sir?”

“The play. It was sad,” he reiterated, but she didn't quite believe him.

They walked, the rest of the way to her house, the whole hour, in complete silence, after that. Every few minutes, Master William’s dangling fingers brushed against her own. It felt like an acute spark, a sense memory. And the tension built as their hands search for the others’ with each step closer.

Until finally, Master William linked their hands in the field just beyond her house. He turned to her, boldly, and said, “Let me see you again. Please.”

She shook her head, “No. It isn’t possible.”

He scoffed, “I live in impossibilities. Do not tell me what can and cannot exist between us, love.”

“What?” she teased him, dragging her hand out of his grip. “Do you expect me to call you war? Play out the fantasy of your play, sir?”

“Their love was fantastical,” he countered, “But never fantasy.”

“You’re speaking in riddles!” she snapped. He had the decency to recoil at her tone. She continued, “You do not know me, sir. And one afternoon at your play does not make us courtiers or even friends.”

“Are you always to be infuriating?” She wanted to bark and ask him to clarify what he meant by saying such things but Master William, she learned, was not a gentleman. Because a gentleman did not kiss a lady he was not married to in the middle of some field.

And yet, Loreley was no lady, either. Her father’s wife liked to remind her of this when Loreley would stand tall and proud. It was her way of cutting Loreley down to size and to remind her what bastard’s were in this world, least of all a bastard of color.

Master William held the back of her head in their kiss like he did not care who she was at all. Loreley was so shocked, she stood in the loop of his arms motionless until he growled against her lips, “Remember me. Kiss me back.”

She was not certain what it was that she was supposed to remember, but she could kiss him back. In fact, she found, that she wanted to kiss him. Desperately.

Her hands gripped at his vest and his hands rested formally on her waist until she leaned into him and then he was gripping at the heavy cloth of her skirts, searching for skin. She swayed in his arms but pulled away breathless when she remembered how close she was to her father’s home.

“No,” she swallowed, turning her face out of their kiss, “We can’t. You shouldn’t have….”

Master William’s hands dropped her skirts so the weight of them kissed against her ankles, propriety retaken. She shuttered at the loss of his hands and his wild, blown pupils searched her eyes. The beat of silence between them shook the world.

And, if she listened to the silence, she could almost hear the whisper of them in a life to come:

_We can’t do this, MJ. They’ll use you to hurt me._

_Fuck fate, Parker. Isn’t that what we’re good at, anyway?_

William snaked his hand up to gently cup her cheek. “From the moment I saw you, I knew I loved you.” His words felt truthful, but they rang that same half truth that terrified her the day before. She brushed his hand away from her cheek and his eyes flashed with insurmountable pain, “Loreley-”

Her mouth settled over his and she hushed, “Shhh.” He sighed into her mouth and held her upper arms to keep himself steady. He was using her as his compass, his true north. She could tell. Against his lips, she reminded him, “I can offer you no status, no land, noth-”

William’s hand cupped the back of her head and tilted her head back to kiss her more severely, “I don’t care.”

Her mind was swamped with echoes. Little voices whispered in her ear about things that have come to pass and will still come to haunt her. Everything about the entire whirlwind day with William felt like a mistake, but it must have been the most sublime tragedy to have felt that good.

William shuttered against her lips, “I don’t care.”

After their kiss on the hilltop, Loreley faltered. She fumbled. And she did not stay away.

Everyday turned into an excuse to go to town or on a walk with Margaret, anything to escape to William for a few hours.

Somedays, she would sit at his feet as he wrote his latest play and peppered her mouth with distracted kisses. Other days, his hands would wind in her perfectly pinned curls and drop them down to her shoulders. And article by article would join her pins on the floor until they were writhing together on his standard issue cot.

His cot was her favorite place in the world. He would leave ink stains on her inner thighs and write poetry on all of the rest of her with his mouth. Blissful happiness like the ones in the storybooks were discovered in the small, fourposter room above the theatre.

William brushed his ink-covered hand across her bare back and she keened into it. “I’m exhausted,” she whined, and he nipped a playful bite between her shoulder blades. He always looked so happy whenever they were together, like she had given him a second chance at life. “William,” she yelped at him.

He grabbed her wrist and kissed the smooth skin there, “My love.”

The inside joke between them made her smile, “My war.”

His heavy eyes found hers, “Marry me.”

Her stomach rolled over in dread. She shook her head, “No.”

“No?” He raised his eyebrow, bracing himself for the blow of her words.

“No,” she repeated, stronger. “No, I can’t.”

“Why not?” he sat up, his eyes swam with angry, bitter tears that he was fighting to keep at bay. “Have I not proven how much I love you?”

“I’m a lady,” she countered.

“You’re not a lady,” he shot down and, somehow, coming from him, the sting of those words was even more severe. She stood, gripping the blankets strewn lazily across his bed to her chest as she dressed. He sighed, “Loreley-”

“Don’t,” she snapped, anger rolling off of her in waves. “You have made it very clear what you think of me, sir.”

“You know I did not mean it like that, my love.” He said the words like he expected her to reply with my war, but she steeled her heart. “Loreley,” he said, sadder than before, “Loreley, please. I have waited for you for…”

“Do not come at me with your fancy words, Master Playwright. I am not one of your heroines to do as you dictate on the page.”

“No,” he snarled, “No, if that were true, you would be much easier to manage.”

“Manage?” she shrieked, “Manage me. Is that what we have planned to do with little miss Loreley, then?”

“No,” he sighed, trying to backtrack from his words, “Loreley, please, do not leave.”

But she cannot listen. When she fastened her last strap, Loreley tugged her hood over her head and headed out into the cobblestone streets. Like history had told this story before, he chased after her. It struck her to the bone, the eerie symmetry of a moment she did not understand.

And, just like before, he grabbed her arm to stop her where she stood, “Loreley, please-”

“Unhand my daughter, sir!” A bewildered voice clamored across the street.

Loreley’s head snapped to her father and William looked equally surprised. He released Loreley’s hand but the damage was done. As she tried to explain, to come up with some excuse to be so familiar with a man, her father’s walking stick was colliding with the side of William’s head. He stumbled backward and blood came away from his fingertips when he touched his head.

“Father, no!” Loreley yelled.

William staggered back to her father and tried to speak but he was met with a second hit, this time louder than the last. “You dishonor my daughter, sir.”

William wiped the messy blood out of his eyes as it dripped down his head, “I love your daughter, m’lord.”

His words only served to enrage her father further and he suddenly demanded a duel, to the death, at sunrise. Loreley yelled down at the two men but she was kept back by a group of her father’s men until the arrangements were made for battle.

A strange thought whispered in her head: _why is he always dying in battle?_

She tried to stamp down the treacherous thought but it was already there, eating away at her insides and filling her body with endless shutters of fear.

The night stretched on in eternity as her father prepared for his duel. She banged on her door and begged him to listen to reason, to hear her voice, but she was just a daughter and a bastard daughter at that. Whatever reason she had for besmirching the family honor was not a good one, regardless of love. She could almost hear her father sneering at her about girlish sentiment.

The sunrise was a horrible sight. It seeped into her room unwelcome and taunting. She dressed for the day hoping to prevent whatever was to come, but in the end, it always happened like this for them. Him dying was an inevitability for their story.

William unsheathed his sword and her father did the same. The man dictating the duel spoke aloud the rules of engagement and the two men listened impassively, like this event was an afternoon errand and not a fight to the death.

Loreley wondered why William was so unmoved until William glanced at Loreley and he seemed at peace. Again, like he knew some great secret she did not know. In one horrible moment, the fool lowered his sword arm and kept his sights on her, like he wanted the last thing in the world that he saw to be her. She covered her mouth to hide her sobs as her father’s blade ran him through.

His body jerked from the impaling but otherwise he did not move much. He sunk further and further on the blade until he toppled over and collapsed on the ground. Loreley ran for him and her father tossed away his sword to catch her in the middle and drag her away from the dying man.

William choked on the bile in his throat and smiled, “We get to try again, my love.”

 _My war_ , she thought, reaching her fingertips out to him and just narrowly managing to brush them. The spark, an old ancient feeling, passed between them before he slipped away.

And she threw up from the back-shattering pain. It raked through her whole body like knives dragging down her spine, ripping away something fundamental from her life. She was without an essential part of herself, now. And she would grow old without him.

She began to go red from the lack of air reaching her lungs. She could not breathe. She could not do anything. She could not, she could not, she could not.

And then, she heard William’s calming voice in her head, _You have to breathe with me. It’s okay. In and out. In and out._

It sounded so clear but she was certain she had never heard him say those words to her before. Still, a memory coaxed her into breathing evenly and when she could breathe, she could think and when she could think, she could cry, and when she could cry, she could clearly see him in a pool of his cooling blood on the ground at her feet.

She did not want to remember him like this, small and broken at her feet. She wanted to remember his inky fingertips and his laughter and the way he would sneak sonnets into her skirts for her to read in the privacy of her room. She wanted to remember them before he went off to battle and fell on his sword for her.

She wanted to remember something else, too, but try as she might, Loreley could not.

And so, she had to wait. To try again.

To kiss him again. To hold him again. To try and save him and keep him and love him longer than she had in this life.

But fate, it seemed, had other plans.


	3. cécile and mailhairer

Cécile slammed her wine cup on the table in anger. Her brother Louis, the more gentle of the two siblings, seemed unbothered by her outburst. But his friend, Jean, more revolutionary than man, seemed delighted by her display.

“Tell us, my little dancer, why the long face?” Jean cooed.

Louis gave his friend a hard, unimpressed look to which Jean only laughed. Cécile growled, “I have been summoned to court.”

The two boys sat up, their attention finally caught. She knew that would get their attention. They were all children of the French revolution and hated the court as much as all of the other commoners, if not more violently.

Louis blanched. The world was an unkind place for commoners, especially in the gilded grasp of the court. She saw him suppress his concern, but his hands shook with fear for his sister, “Cécile, what have you done?”

“Nothing,” she was quick to say. “I was dancing at the nearby tavern. One of those pompous ballet men over at Versaille saw. Monsieur Bernard or something.”

Jean’s shoulders caved with laughter, “The court composer? The court composer summoned you? Why?”

“To dance,” Cecile reiterated to the oaf, her cheeks heated with embarrassment. She knew she was no better than a common street rat and she looked as straggly and drawn-out as one, but she could dance. There were two universal truths in Cécile’s life: the monarchy was evil and she was a born dancer.

The man in the tavern seemed to think so as well, which was why he as good as invited her to dance with the ballet company at Versaille. Good things did not happen to poor people. This felt like a trick. And, most of all, she did not want to rub elbows or interact with any of the courtly gentlemen. Villains. All.

Jean pranced behind Louis, his crude impersonation of Cécile’s dancing, and said, “I say you go, Cécile. Find out what you can for the revolution. Catch the ear of the ladies you can.”

Louis scowled and knocked his friend in the stomach, “You don’t have to, Cécile.”

“Of course she does,” Jean argued. “Else why would she go? To dance?”

Cécile flooded with bitter embarrassment at Jean’s antics but his words struck a chord with her. To bring down the monarchy there would need to be the brave few that faced the men of the court and herded their secrets. Being a member of the royal ballet would offer her such intricate knowledge.

And for this reason, and this reason alone, Cécile packed the meager dance shoes she had and made the long journey to the ballet. When she arrived, a gruff guard led her down a windy corridor and jostled her into the practice room with a push.

She fumbled into the room and gulped. Everyone stared. All of the lithe, pristine, white women with their hair twisted elegantly at the top of their heads. Her own messy, updo stood out.

The jovial man she met at the theatre, slid across the room and shook her hand. There was a bolt of electricity between them that she pointedly ignored. His showed all of his teeth when he smiled but it wasn’t overwhelming or crass, it was warm, “You made it.”

“You asked me to come,” she mumbled.

“Yes,” he raised an eyebrow, “but that hardly guaranteed you would come.”

She could feel the other dancers prickling at his attention to her. Cécile did not want the attention or the heat of his eyes that seemed to ask a thousand questions of her. None of which she knew the answers to, mind you.

“Come,” he led her to a bar at the front of the studio. He cleared his throat and all of the other dancers stood at attention, “Ladies. This is our newest member-“ He looked at her like he was eager for her to supply her name in his silence. She denied his silent request. So he was forced to carry on without her name, “a charming young dancer I saw at a tavern not far from here.”

“Monsieur Bernard,” one of the ladies pipped up, “Perhaps we should discuss such rash decisions in private.”

His continued on like he had not heard the other voice, “We will start with warm-ups, as per usual.” He sat behind his piano and began a jolly tune that felt out of place in the tense, charged room.

Monsieur Bernard’s words, however terse, were final. And, just like that, Cécile was a part of the royal ballet.

After the first rehearsal, as the other girls filed out in droves, knocking into Cécile’s shoulder as they went, Monsieur Bernard crossed to her with a box in his hand. Her expression was questioning and so he laughed, “Open it.” He seemed to be radiating in joy at her presence, which made gave her a healthy dose of suspicion. She was no one to him and yet he was looking at her like she hung the stars.

Cécile clawed open the box and there, hidden between the fine wrappings, was a pair of dance shoes. She blinked, “Monsieur Bernard, this is…too much. How did you even know I would come back?”

He adopted that mysterious, fond look again and whispered, “I just knew.”

“Monsieur Bernard,” she started.

“Mailhairer,” he said, dripping private amusement, “My name is Mailhairer.”

“And why,” she pressed, “is that so funny to you?”

“It means ill-fated, which I believe is the most apt name bestowed on me yet.”

Cécile crossed her arms over her chest and asked, “You put much stock in names, monsieur?”

He distractedly brushed a lock of hair off of her shoulder and the brief skin-to-skin contact on her neck stole all of her breath. “Tell me yours and we shall see.”

Her voice broke on her name, “Cécile.”

“And what does that mean?” he asked, his eyes fiercely intent on every small movement in her face.

Cécile brushed his hand away to regain her senses and said as nobly as she could manage, which did very little as her voice still shook, “Blind. It means blind.”

His lips curled into a knowing smile, “Then, yes, I would say I do put great stock in the meaning of names.”

Her back straightened, “Are you teasing me, monsieur?”

“Perhaps,” he smiled and spun around on his heel. His feet clicked with each step away from her and she raged from the thought of him having the last word. Cécile opened her mouth to speak but Mailhairer spoke again, “You are dismissed.”

That night in the privacy of her Jean’s cellar, Cécile recounted her first day at the court ballet. Her words were drenched in ire as she spoke of Monsieur Mailhairer.

Jean and Louis shared a curious glance and Cécile barked them down, “What?”

Neither men seemed shaken by her outburst, Cécile was prone to them. Instead, Jean stood and smirked into the shallow glass of his wine, “He likes you.”

Cécile scoffed, “Don’t mock me.”

With the gentle patience of a saint, Louis added, “We would never mock you, my darling girl. This courtly gentleman, this composer, he likes you.”

“And you know this how?”

Jean threw back his wine, “Don’t act the innocent, Cécile, it hardly suits you.”

Cécile set her lips in a thin line. She knew what Jean was going to suggest, she knew what other girls in the revolution did to gain information and she was not one of those girls. Especially not to some second-rate, terribly confusing court gentleman with the musings of a child. Music was a fancy of the wealthy. All art was the playground of the rich.

Before Jean could even suggest it, Cécile shook her head, “No cause is worth my honor.”

“I dare say,” Jean slid his eyes over to her in irritation, “You traded your honor to a stable boy a few years ago. Or was it that traveling salesman?”

“Jean,” Louis slammed his hands on the table.

Cécile dropped her shoulders, “What I chose to do with my body is no business of yours.”

“If this Mailhairer likes you, Cécile, do you have any idea what kind of information you could glean on the enemy? Do you know what sort of bedfellow he could make? The secrets he knows? He has the ear of the king, you vile, little-“

“Then send another girl.”

“What other girl?” Jean posed. “Fate has placed you in this Mailhairer’s path. For better or for worse, this is your mission. Your duty to France.”

Cécile looked to Louis for some kind of aid, words of defiance, but she found none there. Instead, her brother’s eyes were glued to the table, his fingers glided against the rim of his drink. Her voice was small, “Louis?”

He sighed and did not look up, “For the revolution.”

The next few months she was dancer and spy, a dazzlingly confusing combination. While she loved to dance, she hated all of the women in her troop. The shining stars of society that seduced and stole the hearts of the French elite. Cécile was like the bastard cousin of the fine art, but Mailhairer found cause to always include her.

He laughed heartily at her jokes, he hung on her every word like he was learning some new, wonderful thing. In this case, the new wonderful thing was her. And she began to suspect that Jean’s suggestion, a warm bedfellow for the court composer, would soon be upon her. Everyday he looked at her longer and harder and more passionately.

It made her skin prickle as she danced, the way he watched her over the top of his pianoforte.

He finally managed to get her alone when she debuted with the ballet several months after joining the company. Mailhairer, never to be outdone on gifts, gave Cécile her own dressing room just off stage left. It was a small, but beautiful room.

Her costumes hung limply on the wall and a beautiful vanity set leaned against one of the accented lilac walls. Mailhairer had put a vase of flowers on the stand beside the vanity and Cécile tried not to be delighted.

He was the enemy. The seat of privilege.

And yet, when she turned around to gape at him for his generosity, he was standing nervously in the doorway gauging her reaction. His shoulders were hunched, his demeanor cautious, and Cécile laughed.

He startled and she laughed harder. “What?” he squeaked.

“The great Monsieur Bernard practically shaking in his heels over the opinion of some lowly dancer.”

“Low?” he whispered reverently. “You are not lowly. You’re…my god, Cécile, you are exquisite. If you could only see-“

Cécile dared to ask, “And how do you see me?”

His eyes were liquid, “You know.”

Her stomach turned over in clenching delight, “You shouldn’t. We shouldn’t.” But even as she said the words they fell flat on her tongue. She was a good spy, but a mediocre liar. Being around Mailhairer made her feel different. Cherished. She had never been cherished before, had never known dedicated, focused attention. He looked at her like he saw her and, she figured, that was how all people wanted to be gazed upon.

“We should,” he groaned, closing the final steps between them so they were flush against one another. Her body instinctively arched against him, like a well rehearsed dance.

They stood there, bodies touching, but nothing more for quite some time. She realized he was waiting for her to make the final choice. It was her decision. To leave or leap.

She leapt and the world cracked open with endless possibilities.

He singed hot, feverish kisses against her lips. His chest purred in delight and her stomach turned to liquid gold, beautiful and warm. “Oh Mailhairer,” she sighed.

He grabbed at her waist and lifted her up onto his vanity, knocking all of his baubles aside to make room for her. Her silky legs wrapped around his waistband and she felt the dizzying pulse of his body tuning to hers. “We shouldn’t,” he teased her, dragging his hands underneath her skirt. Her mouth fell open as he prodded at her with solid, eager fingers.

“We should,” she scrambled for fabric on his shoulders to steady herself as he worked her to a swift, floaty release. She crowed his name in ecstasy as he took her on the vanity. The mirror banged against the wall with every moment of bliss until the banging stopped and Mailharier stood slumped over her, kissing the exposed patches of skin on her shoulder.

She breathlessly dragged his mouth to hers to punctuate their finish, which only served to send his prodding fingers below her skirts again to take her dancing along the stars. She saw brilliant colors and heard distant tongues as she fell into the void of his relentless pleasure.

And, finally, when they were done she let out a throaty laugh, “Four times was unnecessary.”

He nibbled on her neck, “Five times.”

“Four and a half,” she submitted. “Where did you learn to do that?”

His eyes darkened to storms, “Old lovers.” It felt like one of his half truths, again, like he did not trust her to know his past. Or worse, like he suspected she already mystically knew.

“Old lovers,” she repeated, “How worldly of you.”

“Rather worldly, yes,” he nodded, sucking a patch of bruises into her skin. “One was Egyptian. Another English.”

“No French?”

“None before you,” he said honestly.

His overeager hands slipped back beneath her skirts and she squealed, “Mailhairer.”

“Yes, that’s it,” he smirked, “Say my name.”

And she did again and again that afternoon.

Laying with Mailhairer, after that, became an easy habit to make. She spent the better half of every day in rehearsal with him as he led the troop into the next dancing fancy of the king. And when rehearsal was done, she would linger backstage where Mailhairer would find her. Sometimes they would spent all evening talking, revealing secrets, and others they would say nothing at all. Save each other’s panted names in the darkness.

She knew the other dancers considered her Monsieur Mailharier’s exotic fancy, but when he backed her up against the set piece backstage and sung praises into her neck she could not allow herself to believe such horrible things. Not that she should care, she reminded herself. He was the enemy of the French people, born with privilege and a silver spoon of opportunity in his mouth.

He could lay with her, make her insides squirm with the tides of his body, but she would one day bring him down when the revolution took back the country. And he would die. She wished he would die.

Except in the morning when the sunshine made his hair look almost auburn and he dressed her body with the softest, sweetest kisses a man could ever bestow.

If he knew that she relayed the court’s secrets to the revolutionaries, he never said. Sometimes, she suspected that he had an inkling that the French people were going to rise up against the monarchy. When he did not think she was looking at him, he would gaze at her so sad. And why else would he be sad?

One year of bliss, a happiness that felt dishonest and on the best days felt like cheating, passed. And then, two. And only into the second year of their affair did Mailhairer finally begin to relax. He stopped looking for problems around every corner and Cécile hated herself for feeling content.

And so, she stormed the Bastille. And the revolution exploded into action and the monarchy was in disarray. When Mailhairer found her the following day in the midst of the people’s chaos she looked wild and like the daughter of the Revolution she had always been in hiding.

He gave one look at her and rubbed his eyes like he was so tired of something. She could not pinpoint what. Mailhairer spoke nonsense, “So this is how it goes this time.”

Cécile blinked in confusion but she did not relent. The revolution was upon them.

It took some time for the monarchy to recover after that, but they eventually found a tentative peace with the people, and the ballet opened again. Cécile was not welcomed back. The other girls were skeptical of her motives and Cécile could not blame them.

But Mailhairer did not stay away long. He found her a few months after the storming of the Bastille in Jean’s little tavern. He was dressed in his usual finery and the men whooped at him as he entered. Cécile stood up and pushed herself through the crowd to him and drew him into the back room.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded. He pulled back his cloak and kissed her all in one foul swoop. She squeaked and tried to pull away. “Stop,” she pushed at his chest and he sorrowfully let her go. She gasped for air, “What are you doing?”

“If you think I care about the lying and the spying…I don’t.” His eyes were sunk-in and sad, “I don’t know how much time I have left now.”

“What are yo-” she tried to speak.

He pressed on, “You and I both know this peace cannot hold. They’ll start killing us soon.” She remembered Jean’s whispers of a machine, a blade that brought death down upon the monarchy’s head. He kissed her hands, “Cécile give me whatever days or months or, god bless me, years I have left with you. Please.”

In the end, they had years. Four of them. Horrible, bloody terrible years with endless cries for murder against the monarchy. Until, finally, the fighting ended.

And the killing began.

Jean crowed about the guillotine. He said it was more mercy than those evil bastards deserved. He leered down at Cécile, always looking like one day he might pounce on her, and told her that had taken her composer, too.

It had been several days since she had seen Mailhairer, not an uncommon occurrence at the height of war, and knew if Jean was telling the truth he would only be in one place. The place where all of their troubles had began: the Bastille.

Dressed in her uniform of freedom, Cécile slipped past the guards and into the prison. As she looked out the window of the prison, she could see the scaffold in the moonlight waiting for the morning. Calling out to its victims to be ready.

A whisper tickled at her ear:

_It’s a trap, Peter. It’s a trap._

She turned around sharply to see no one. The voice, the echo, was just the wind. Cécile pulled her cloak closer around her shoulders.

When she found Mailhairer he looked like he had not eaten in days. His face was long and drawn but his smile was always the same and it shone in a special way just for her.

She sat on her knees and scooted as close as she could manage to the prison bars, “Mailhairer.”

He croaked, his voice raged from days without water, “Femi?”

She shook her head, “It’s Cécile.”

He laughed until it turned ugly and hoarse like a cough.

She had a painful thought. She was the reason he was in here. When so many people in court had run away, escaped to nearby countries Mailhairer had stayed. And he had stayed for her.

Cécile might as well have been the man bringing down the ax.

“It never hurts,” he hummed to himself, speaking to Cécile like an easy companion, not his pseudo-executioner. It startled her, his words held a rush of honesty that were tangled in a web of confusion.

She pressed, “What doesn’t hurt?”

He reached for her hands through the bars and she allowed him to brush her knuckles, a parting gift for a dead man. “Dying,” he chuckled. “It never hurts.”

Her face transformed into skeptical curiosity, “Are you being poetic?”

“Not in this life,” he shrugged in an infuriatingly wise manner. Whatever his words meant she could not piece out for herself. He was as maddening now, hours away from the guillotine, as he was the first day she met him at the ballet. The only difference was his finery had been stripped away. Mailhairer looked awfully common in his tattered rags sitting on the dirty prison floor.

Cécile yanked her hand away from him and stood up.

She would not feel sympathy for this man. No matter who he had become to her. She was a daughter of the revolution, France was for freedom now, not the tyranny of the royals. She had drawn a line in the sand the day she had decided to infiltrate the ballet and learn their secrets, she reminded herself. Every moment she shared with Mailhairer was a lie, a carefully crafted folly to gain intelligence for the revolution.

Or it had been. Once.

He smiled tiredly at her and her heart cried out a name. Two names that were not his own: _Marcus and William_.

“You talk in riddles, monsieur.”

“You always say that, too.”

She screeched in anger. Nothing he said made any sense. He was not the person in control here, she was; after all, Cécile was the one that might as well have walked him to his death. She had been the woman that had spied on him from months at the foot of his bed. She had been the person who had laid tangled up in his arms and spoken into the morning in hushed whispers about her dreams and aspirations. And he had been the one that had indulgently listened, hanging on to her every word like scripture.

“Mailhairer,” she croaked, overwhelmed by the memories of days as good as gone, “I’m sorry. I’m the reason this is happening to you.” And while she did not regret the revolution, a traitorous part of her heart cried out for the man behind the bars. He was scarcely out of boyhood, his face grew hair in patches and they were going to cut it clean off of his shoulders.

His face softened and he implored her to reach back through the bars and grab his hand, like that small gesture would offer him immeasurable strength to face the morning bells. “I have loved you,” he said emphatically, “And I will always love you.”

She realized he had not disagreed with her. He did not deny that she was, in fact, the reason for his death. Perhaps, she considered, he had always known it would end in this manner. The French court had known for years that the common people were unhappy. They had to have suspected something like this would happen.

But Mailhairer’s calm was unlike that reasoning. It was a deeper, more resigned knowing. Like, he had met her in that crowded room and something in the world told him he would die for her. Like, she was his death sentence.

She could tell he sensed her thoughts turning dark and cold because he squeezed her fingers, “I do not regret choosing you. To have you for a year or for a minute. It doesn’t matter. I would have chosen you.”

“You’re an idiot,” she chastised him, pressing her face up against the bars to try and find his lips. She knew she was a spy, she knew it was meant to be fake, but the string of fate pulling at her abdomen, dragging her back into his orbit, would not quit.

He twisted his face to fit through the bars just enough to kiss her. She felt wet, hot tears on her face and was horrified when she could not figure out who they were from. “Mailhairer,” she cried into his mouth, “I’m so sorry.”

“Hush now,” he pecked her lips, “It’s going to be okay.”

In a wave of reckless sentiment, she announced, “I’ll save you. I can break you out of here.”

He gripped her hands through the bars and looked at her in the most serious manner she had ever seen grace his features, “Don’t you dare. This is how it’s supposed to go. Don’t you change a single thing, not a single moment.”

“I could save you, you fool,” she snapped.

The future shouted into the void:

_Let me save you, you stupid idiot!_

“You don’t know if that changes anything. Leave me be, Cécile. Let me go.” He withdrew his hand from her grip. “It’s almost light. You should go. The monarchy has fallen and so must I.”

She pressed her body up against the bars, “Mailhairer, in the grand scheme of injustice against the people-”

“I am a part of the nobility. Your people will never let me live. And they’ll punish you for trying to help me. Listen to me,” Mailhairer whispered, his nose poking through the bars, eyes locked on hers, “we had seven years, Cécile. It gets longer each time. It’s okay.”

Cécile knocked her nose against Mailhairer’s and her eyes shuttered close, “Please, make sense.”

His warm breath tickled her cheeks, “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” The glow from a lantern turned down the corridor and Mailhairer retreated into his cage. Cécile bit down the sob forming in the back of her throat and he smiled sloppily at her, a reckless boy to the end, “Go now, my love.”

_My war._

When the sun rose on the scaffold, Cécile clutched her dance shoes to her chest. The crowd around her called for blood, for battle, for war. And that was when Mailhairer and his comrades at the nearby prison climbed out of the carriage. The other men were shaking, terrified by the glistening silver blade dangling overhead. Mailhairer looked bored. Like death was a bothersome friend that was wasting his precious time. She could have strangled him for how caviler he looked in the midst of a battle.

His eyes found hers as the guillotine dropped down on the first man’s head. The crowd whooped and cheered. And Mailhairer smiled. Not a dark, burdened grin that indicted his murderers. No, an effortless smile that was only meant for her.

She could only offer a watery attempt in return. He lifted his chin as if to tell her to keep her head up and she did a pale imitation of his request.

The executioner jostled Mailhairer to the guillotine and Cécile locked her jaw down to stop whatever emotions threatened to bubble to the surface. His steps were heavier than she had ever heard them. It was like his death march was the only sound in the whole square.

She wished he would look away so she could do the same, but she would not turn away from him first. If he needed her strength to face his death than she would stand by and hold him up in whatever way she could do from the crowd below.

When they strapped him in to the machine, the crowd jeered. The tacky blood of the first man dashed across his throat like an angry cut. A priest began to pray for his soul, heaven almighty protect him, and Cécile panicked.

He was going to die. In that moment it all became outrageously clear that if she did not do something he would die. She stepped forward and began to make her way through the bodies blocking her way to the scaffold. His eyes widened and she was not sure whose heart was beating faster: hers or his. But she could feel them both pounding in her chest.

The man in the mask asked, “Any last words?”

And Mailhairer looked her dead in the eye and roughed out, _“Michelle, no!”_

The name startled them both. A new name, but one familiar to both Mailhairer and Cécile. She knew it was her, somehow, she knew to take it as her own. He tried to say something else. Something significant-

And the blade came down.

She collapsed in agony in the crowd. A sharp and indescribable pain shot through every synapse of her body. It radiated in her neck and traveled down to every inch of her skin, like it was on fire. There was no breath, no life, no feeling except agony.

The people surrounding her rustled in concern and Louis broke through the crowd to pick his sister up. His voice called out to her, “Cécile, my sweetest sister.”

She covered her ears. All of the noise and the feeling was too much. She could not concentrate on one particular sensation. They were all drowning her.

And she could not breathe. She choked on air.

Until finally, she passed out.

When she woke she felt a hollow pang in her chest. She had, for a moment, felt two heart beats surging there. Now, neither. She was certain she was alive, but she did not feel alive.

Cécile curled in on herself and cried.

Louis joined her a few hours later as she stared blankly at the wall. He offered no kind words, only this, “I didn’t know.”

She rolled over to face her back to him.

Many weeks later, she finally rose from bed. She packed her bags and took the closest ship to London. There, she went to an old theatre where Mailhairer had once told her he had seen the most spectacular play. Epic love, he had called it. Fate guided each of her steps.

And like Mailhairer, or some greater force, was looking over her, the theatre was putting on William Barker’s play. The one that Mailhairer had told her about.

She sat impassive the entire play until the last line whispered an augury of fate: we will meet again, my love.


	4. lola and dmitry

Lola walked through the encampment as the crisp, late-fall air nipped at her cheeks. Her band of Romani brethren wandered through many eastern countries but none as beautiful as Russia and every winter they found refuge there between the trees. It was her favorite country to make camp, the world seemed old and ancient in those forests. 

A gust of wind blew her war and Lola tugged her heavy jacket around her body, crunching through the fallen leaves to where the children danced around the fire. The heat rushed to her as she got closer and Lola smiled at the little girl singing an old, Romani tune to the crowd of smiling adults. 

Lola lifted her skirts just above her ankle and began to dance to the song. The little girl, Anita, caught her eye and sang louder. 

They danced and sang and drank for hours, the moonlight casting a funny shadow on the camp until one by one, the Romani troupe padded back to their tents full of wine and good cheer. 

Spotting Anita curled up sleepily near the fire, Lola called out, “My little dove!” Anita’s eyes flickered open, “Off to bed with you.” 

Anita groused but did as Lola bid and, after, Lola was alone at the fire. She found sleeping fitful at best most nights. Nightmares haunted her dreams. Horrible, terrible dreams of boys with stars in their eyes and blood on their hands. 

Lola drew her knees into her chest and began to sang an old folk song under her breath, one that she had heard her mother coo into her ear in the throws of childhood. She lifted her chin up to the sky, as if to bathe in the moonlight, and continued to sing. 

And then, she heard the snap of a branch. 

Lola sprang to her feet, her hand reaching for the hidden curved knife hidden in the folds of her skirt. In stilted Russian, she barked into the trees, “Show yourself.”

A man, no older than twenty, propelled himself from between the trees into the warm glow of the firelight. The firelight flickered on his uniform. Russian. She could have spat. For such a beautiful country, their soldiers were no better than brutes. Agents of an evil tsar and slaves to an even crueler country. 

She did not try to hide the disgust and hate welling in her eyes. 

He did not look at her like the enemy. No. He gawked at her.

He seemed stunned, which she counted her blessings for, he would be easier to overcome if he was not expecting her to attack. She drew her knife into the open and parted her legs into a strong, opening stance. Artem had once shown her how to fight. Quick and viscous, he had said. Lola could be both of those things. 

Only when she drew her knife did he stop staring at her like he had been clubbed in the head. He glanced down at her knife and back up to her face and then-

He doubled over in laughter. 

She startled and her eyes narrowed suspiciously. “What?” she growled, “Do you think I don’t know how to use it?”

He wiped uselessly at his eyes. “No,” he shook his head. His Russian was much cleaner than hers, “I, just, never thought it would ever be you.” 

Lola blanched, “What does that even mean?”

“Nothing,” he chuckled, and stood at his full stature, which admittedly was not that tall, and pressed on, “Are you going to kill me, then?”

She twirled the knife in her hand in a frighteningly practiced manner, “Perhaps.”

“Alright,” the boy sniffed, “Get on with it, then.” 

Lola barred her teeth, more animal than girl, “I’ll do it, you know.” 

He nodded, “Oh believe me. I don’t doubt it.” He opened his arms like he was inviting her to stab him in the heart, which made her heart flicker with doubt. He was so assured, so certain that she was going to strike, it had to be a trap. She was no fool. The people in her camp did not survive in the wilderness by getting tricked by traps.

So, she slowly lowered her knife. She was not going to attack him. For him to be so calm he had to be some miraculous military man, one she could not take in hand-to-hand combat.

He raised his eyebrow, surprised, “Oh. So, you’ve decided you aren’t going to kill me?”

“The verdict is still out on that.” As if to prove it, she did not put her knife away. He noticed. And she smirked. 

“My unit,” he gestured behind him into the trees, “They’re camped not far from here. I came out to here relieve myself. If I can find you…so can they. You should pack up your camp and leave.”

She squinted, “Why would you help us?” 

He looked like he was going to say something, but he instead settled on, “I’m not in the business of killing pretty girls.” He teased, “Even ones that want to kill me.” 

Lola tightened her grip on her knife, “What’s your name, soldier?”

The boy’s face spread in a strange, delighted grin. Lola felt the back of her neck prickle and she considered throwing her knife at his neck to end this conversation once and for all. She stayed her hand. The Russian licked his lips, “You want to know my name?”

“I asked,” she scoffed, “didn’t I?”

He stuffed his hands in his state issued uniform and smiled broader. He had a nice smile. “Dmitry,” he said clearly, like he wanted her to really listen and absorb it. Like he considered this moment of paramount importance. “My name is Dmitry. And yours?”

Lola glanced beyond the trees to see if any of his comrades had joined him for an afternoon bathroom break, but there were none there. She knew she was wasting time talking to him. She knew that she should be burying her knife in his chest and warning her people that a Russian legion was nearby. But she found herself trapped in a conversation with this boy, this Dmitry. And worse still, she did not want to stop taking to him. 

“Lola,” she gruffly said, “My name is Lola.” 

“I like your name,” he said pleasantly. Like this was a conversation they were having over soup at a campfire, not in the darkness with her knife drawn and his entire unit sleeping somewhere nearby. She had never interacted with a Russian soldier before but, somehow, she knew that this was not a typical interaction. Dmitry was strange. Stranger than any man she had ever met. He had taken one look at her knife and laughed. Perhaps, she thought, he was crazy. “Do you know what it means?” he asked. 

She held tight to the hilt of her knife like it gave her some sort of mystical power. Tightly, she replied, “Sorrow.” 

“Ah,” he mused, “Yes, well, that’s fitting.”

“Are you calling me sorrowful, soldier?” she snapped.

His features softened into displaced fondness, “I hardly know you well enough to say.” It felt like an inside joke, his words, and Lola growled. She had known Dmitry for all of five minutes and he was acting as if they were old friends that he had happened to come upon in the forest. She loathed him. 

“Fine, then,” she prodded, “what does yours mean?” 

“It has a couple of meanings,” he said, taking a cautious step toward her. She took the same amount of room back away from him. Lola wanted to keep her distance. This strange man was her enemy, no matter how congenial he was pretending to be. “Of the earth,” he put his hands up as if to calm a nervous animal and stepped forward, “like….death. I am born and return to earth. Morbid, isn’t it?”

Lola remained, against her better judgement, standing by the fire, transfixed by each step he took toward her. The closer he got the more interesting her became. His nose had obviously been broken a few times as it was crooked and bent in two places. Yet, somehow, it made him look even more goofy and dignified. He was handsome. She was ashamed to realize that was what was so intriguing about his features: he was handsome and she noticed. 

“Are you the bringer of death?” Lola whispered, the crackle of the fire louder than her voice.

His lips quirked upwards, “No, not me.” She heard the unspoken words, the insinuation that she was the one who brought death. 

Lola’s face lit up in fury, “Go now and I’ll let you live.” He pressed a presumptuous hand on her waist and her mouth dropped open in shock. He looked so thrilled by his audacity and her reaction. She could have stabbed him. Really, the knife was still sitting in the palm of her hand. “How dare you,” she hissed.

“I like this dress,” he ignored her outrage. “This life suits you.” 

“Is that a remark on me being Romani, soldier?”

He sighs like she’s missed some key ingredient, like he almost expected her to, “No. Nothing. Ignore me.”

She knocked his hand off of her waist and spat in his face, “I’m trying.” 

He wiped away her spit but did not look at all bothered by her response. Again, only amusement. It was dripping off of him in irritating waves that were smacking her in the face with every passing second. Nothing she did seem to affect him or even alarm him.

“Okay,” he rumbled, “I’m going.” True to his word, Dmitry began to back away from her and suddenly Lola could breathe. Like he had snatched the air from her lungs when he was so close and now she could taste the sweetness of breath. She took a faulty step toward him and stopped herself, had to force her feet to stall. He was yanking her into his orbit and she was not one to be taken by a pretty face, much less a Russian one. 

He adopted a serious soldier persona for only a moment, “Pack your things and run.” And then, as strangely as he had arrived, he was gone. 

She took a heavy breath to compose herself before she headed his advice and ran to the tents, waking up every man, woman and child at the camp. Bleary eyed children clung to their parents and the leaders of the camp discussed their best course of action. 

Some argued for them to stay and fight, others wanted to run and find safety and shelter where they could. She knew the blood of her people did not take well to cowardess, but the Russian army was better supplied then they were and her people had children with them.

It was because of the children they finally ran. In waves they left to not draw attention to themselves and Lola stayed behind to leave with the final group to make sure that everyone was safe. 

This was the lie she told herself to avoid facing the fact that she would not have minded seeing Dmitry again. In the nights following his strange arrival, she slept without nightmares; in fact, she dreamed. Dizzy dreams of kisses and heroes unlike any she had ever seen before. She dreamed that Dmitry could fly. He swung between buildings built like mountains and called her Em. 

She saw him so often in her dreams that when he came wandering back into camp she half-expected him to be a phantom of her dreams. Until he smiled at her and weakly waved, “Hi.” 

Lola was so startled her hand flew out and collided with his face. His already crooked nose broke and began to gush buckets of blood. Her people left at the camp gawked at the sight. And Dmitry cursed in a language she barely had enough control over to speak complete sentences. She did manage to piece out his lamenting, “That’s the second time you’ve done that.” 

She has a strange rush, almost a memory, of a tiny house and a boy bleeding into a rag. Marcus. War. Egypt. But as soon as she can hold onto the memory long enough to make it semi-tangeable it was gone. 

She did not apologize for her attack, instead she demanded, “What are you doing here?”

He clutched his nose to help contain the bleeding and looked up at her in exasperation, “I wanted to see if you were alright.” He tacked on, “If I had known you were going to hit me I might have reconsidered.” 

Lola could feel all of the eyes on her, the curious, probing questions that were beginning to take form in the camp, and so she rushed him into the nearest tent. Her own. 

Inside, she tossed a rag at him and he quickly staunched the bleeding. She huffed, yanked him down into a seated position on her furs, and tipped his head back to help stop the flow of blood. “Keep your head back, or else you’ll get blood everywhere.” 

“I wouldn’t,” he moaned, “have gotten blood on everything if you hadn’t punched me.” 

“You shouldn’t have come back and startled me.” 

“I don’t punch people when they surprise me!” 

She raised her voice, “Be grateful I didn’t break your neck!” 

Another voice, a younger one, shrieks: 

You stupid, bullheaded-

He laughed, or she assumed it was a laugh, but with the injury it sounded more like a muffled gargle, “Sorry.” 

Her entire body language deflated and she found herself quipping, “Why’d you even come back here?” 

Dmitry‘s eyes turned on her, golden and wholesome, “I had to see you.” 

“You don’t know me,” she argued. 

His words were loaded, “Doesn’t matter. I had to see you.”

“What?” her voice was higher and more nervous than she would have liked, “Because I’m some silly Romani girl you think you can toss a few nice words at me and I’ll drag you into bed? Because that’s not how this goes.” 

Dmitry rolled his eyes. She knew that it sounded like she was fighting with him just to fight, but she could not help it. He made her nervous and more nervous than just because of his rank in the Russian army. He made the girly, secret parts of her nervous. The parts that she swore she would never let fall prey to a winning smile or a flirty comment. 

“That’s not what I’m expecting.” 

Her face fell, “So, what? I’m not good enough for a good and loyal Russian?”

“Are you to argue with me on every point just for argument’s sake?”

She had no good answer for him, so she opted to sit in silence as he took care of his nose. The next hour they sat in icy silence as he waited for the bleeding to stop. Every once in a while, their shoulders would brush and linger and neither of them stopped the other from this simple pleasure. She did not have to talk to him to share in his warmth or delight at the delicious surge of electricity his touch awoke in her. 

Growing bold, his hand eventually reached across for hers. She snarled, “What do you think you’re doing?”

“You’re being very difficult in this life, you know that?” She gawked at him before he answered in a way that made actual sense, “I’m trying to hold your hand.” 

“And why do you think I wanted you to hold my hand?” she challenged.

His face flushed in deeply rooted embarrassment. He snatched his hand away like he had been burned and stuttered, “I’m sorry. You’re right. I just…assumed.”

She would never know why she did it. Later, she would blame his adorable broken nose and the endearing way he had started to apologize. But, in truth, she did it mostly because she wanted to and Lola did not deny herself the things that she wanted. She was only going to live one life and so she did not understand the point of denying her heart what it desired.

Lola hoisted her leg over Dmitry’s lap, effectively straddling him, and he blinked up at her in terror and the edge of something else. He looked at her the way she had seen lovers over the years look. Her mother had called this look a word once and she had never seen it up close before. She had never been gazed at. 

Dmitry‘s chest rose and fell in a shallow pattern and Lola smirked. He was practically shaking beneath her fingertips. She traced the ends of her fingers along the bridge of his broken nose and he closed his eyes in pain. “Don’t,” he mumbled, “We shouldn’t.” 

Then, strangely, his eyes snapped open. Like the very words that came out of his mouth surprise him. Like he had gone off the rails of some predetermined script. 

She rolled her eyes and slanted her mouth over his and he sighed like she had delivered him from loneliness. Lola felt it, too. He lifted a shaky hand up to cup her face and she did not stop him. She tilted her hips against his own in an eager, jerky manner. Each gesture dragged a helpless, desperate sound from the back of his throat. 

Lola was no blushing maid. She did not falter when he rid her of her dress, nor did she pause when he kissed down her torso in a precise, practiced manner, nor did she gnaw on her lip in fear when, in one swift motion, he sheathed himself inside of her. She matched his every yearning and fueled the fire that was pulsing underneath his skin and bleeding into her bones. They blazed brilliantly and far too soon it was over. 

She laid on his chest after and squinted at his broken nose, “Does it hurt?” 

He turned his head and his floppy hair followed, “My nose?” 

Lola rolled her eyes and sarcastically quipped, “No, your gentle heart. Yes, your nose.” 

Dmitry kissed her distractedly, “No. No, its okay.” Silence enveloped the tiny ten as Dmitry searched deep for the courage to ask, “When do you leave?” She pushed herself onto his chest and kissed down the line of his chest to the patch of skin just above her favorite part of him. He bit down a groan as she nibbled on the sensitive area. “Lola,” he gulped, “Answer me.” 

“First light,” she said offhandedly. 

He yanked her up to crush his lips against her own and she pouted. There was something else she would rather be doing with her mouth, but Dmitry was so infuriatingly taken with kissing her lips. He kissed her like he did not have enough time to cherish her. Which was preposterous. 

“Lola,” he pushed into her mouth. Her name was sweetest on his lips, “Lola, my darling, run away with me?” 

She giggled against his lips and swatted easily at his bare chest, “You’re the craziest man I’ve ever met.” 

“Lola, please,” his voice sounded sad, she thought, and she tried to kiss away his agony. And he let her, like he knew that he could not fight destiny. She would leave tomorrow and never see him again, but they could have the night. 

And so, he took her for the night. And he kissed her like every kiss could have been their last. And he held her in his arms and shattered her heart into a million pieces until all the pieces were singing his name in unison: Dmitry, Dmitry, Dmitry.

His hands were never idle and every time she thought he would rest or relent, he would push through the fatigue and take her walking through the galaxy where there was no light or darkness or sound or knowledge. Only the sensation of something greater. 

The sun tickled her nose awake the next morning and Lola hid her face in the safety of Dmitry’s broad chest. He rumbled a laugh and ran his fingers through the softness of her hair, getting tangled as he tried, “Are you not a morning person?”

“Hardly,” she reasoned, pushing herself off of the bed. She dressed efficiently and with her clothes back on their moment was over. She told herself it didn’t matter. There would be others, many others in her life of wandering, but the way that he looked at her she was not sure anyone else would be able to duplicate. 

Good, she harshly thought, I am no man’s flowered lady. 

“We can still go,” he rubbed his face and sat up, the furs pooled at his waist. Lola had no qualms about gawking at him. He glanced down at his chest and back up to her eyes and, infuriatingly, he smirked, “We could run away.” 

“Run away from what?” she tossed her hair back, “I don’t run.” 

“All Romani run,” he shook his head and dressed.

She narrowed her eyes at him and petulantly crossed her arms over her chest, “Wandering is not running.” 

“Like hell it isn’t, MJ,” he buckled up his boots.

“You don’t know me, Dmitry.”

“Please,” he stood to his full stature, which felt intimidating in spite of his size, “You don’t even believe that.” 

She opened her mouth to speak and promptly shut it. Lola could have argued, said she didn’t know what he was implying, but it would have tasted false and bitter on her tongue and, for some reason, she knew she could lie to herself, but the thought of lying to Dmitry was much more difficult. She felt for him. A strange and otherworldly feeling. 

“I don’t,” she coughed, “I don’t know what you mean.”

He stepped into her space and her breath hitched prettily, like a maiden in one of those western stories. Dmitry whispered, “Leave me. Use me. But don’t lie to me.” 

She parted her lips, “Dmitry, I-”

“RUSSIAN GUARDS!” A voice cried from beyond her tent. Lola’s stomach flared in fear and she pushed her legs out of her tent and into what was left of her camp. It was on fire. She roared in despair. 

Dmitry stumbled out of her tent and she looked to him, her eyes furious, “You did this. You led them straight to us.” 

His eyes widened, “No, I didn’t. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t!”

“You betrayed us,” she slammed her hands against his chest and he stumbled backward. 

He looked desperately at her, looking to draw something out of her, some kindness, she was not capable of finding as her friends and families homes burned. She had gotten most of them away, but those that remained Dmitry as good as killed them himself. 

“Lola,” he reached for her. She drew her knife. It shone in the flickers of the flames and he did not miss her meaning. She wanted him to know that she would kill him, that if he took another step forward she would slice him to bits. “Lola,” he tried again, raising his hands, “Lola, you have to believe me.” 

“A Russian?” she spat on the ground, “I would rather die.” 

His eyes watered, “Don’t say that. Don’t ever say that.” 

“You talk in riddles!” she yelled. And he jumped at the magnitude of her voice. She could have blown her whole village down with just the fury of her tone. “You call me names I don’t know and say things that make no sense. You filthy Russian swine!” 

“Lola,” he spoke lowly, beseeching her to listen but she would not. She was done listening to his lies, “Lola, I did not do this.” 

Lola could hear the screams of her people burning, of the women the soldiers cut down with glee. She could hear the horses squealing and children crying. The tragedy filled her body until there was nothing left of Lola but wrath.

She lunged with her knife as battle raged around them. 

Dmitry did not move, he did not try and move out of the way of her attack. She felt the full force of her blade impale him. It sunk into his skin with a sickening squelch. He gasped and she looked into his eyes, digging it deeper. 

Her hands came away red with his blood and she tumbled backward, a shooting deep pain in her side. She fumbled to stop the pain, to abate it somehow, but nothing work. It radiated like a flesh wound. 

His eyes widened in some nauseous realization. Lola looked at him in agony. 

Dmitry collapsed to the ground. She fell, too. Too ill to think and her mind swimming with immeasurable suffering. 

Dmitry’s bloody hands dragged his body over to where she lay and he gently brushed her hair out of her face as she cried, weeping into the ground and begging the pain to stop. She felt him coat her hair with his blood and she was too weak to do anything but cry harder. He kissed her face as his own paled, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.” She choked on the bile raising in her throat until she vomited. He cupped her face and pressed his wavering lips to hers, “I didn’t know you felt it.” 

“Riddles,” she gasped.

And Dmitry, with one last push of strength, rolled off of her and died. 

The agony of her own radiating, invisible wound doubled. She shook and screamed and the Russian soldiers around her shouted witchcraft, cried for revenge for their fallen comrade, and took her suffering away with one aimed gunshot to her head. 

Her last thought in that life was this: Peter.


	5. adla and phoenix

Adla hated the war. It swept her elder brother, Jonanthan, into the navy and radically changed her life overnight. Everyone knew about the European War– her father quietly called it the War to End All Wars– but, living in California, it had felt a world away. She had never expected it to come to her doorstep. Until, the Germans broke treaty and President Woodrow Wilson declared war. 

It was 1918 and Adla hated the world. She hated that men were dying in the thousands and families were being ripped apart and new, lethal gases strangled men in their sleep. She hated that in a world where peace was always an option the allied and central powers chose war. She hated, hated, the war. 

Every man she knew under the age of twenty-five had been shipped out to fall on their swords for freedom and country. And with every passing day, more and more mothers got a flimsy little folded up flag for their son’s bravery abroad instead of a safe welcome home. Adla hated the war and prayed that Jonathan came home as flesh and blood and not as a symbolic flag. 

After he was shipped out, Adla puttered around in San Francisco with the rest of her family, looking for anything to do to help the war effort and to bring their boy’s home safe. And then, six months after Johnny had up and gone to fight some European’s war, she saw a posting for the Mare Island Naval Shipyard. A factory that war hiring out women to make munitions and build ships, what with the boys away at war. 

So she packed up her few meager belongings, contacted a boarding house for girls from Adla’s neighborhood and hopped a train north to join the war effort. 

It was hard, long and tiresome work but Adla didn’t mind. It felt nice to be needed and to get her hands covered in grease. Steeped in the sweat and the roar of machines, Adla could almost forget that men were dying across an ocean. 

The other ladies in her unit, affectionately called the grit girls (as there were only 10 or 15 colored women working at MINSY), pulled up their breeches each and every day and built as fast as they could pump out engines and motors. 

Dina, one of the boarders and grit girls, was the one that after four months of hard labor decided they all needed a night out, a break from the rest of the Rosies breaking their backs day in and day out. 

“Don’t ya miss dancing, Miss Adla?” Dina dipped under Adla’s arm as she dipped hot metal into the water tub, cooling it down. It gave a high-pitched hiss. 

Adla rolled her eyes, “I have to get into work early tomorrow, Dina. Put don’t let me stop you from having a good time.” 

Stella clicked her tongue and smirked at Dina, “What did I tell you, Dina. Adla isn’t one much for fun.” 

Dina pouted prettily at Adla, appealing to her soft heart, “Come on, Miss Adla. I promise you’ll have a swell time. Besides, some naval officers are gonna be coming around. They’re docked here for the rest of the week until the repairs on their ship are all finished.” 

Adla felt a tickle of irritation welling in her head. She yanked off her welding gloves and pulled back her goggles, wiping the sweat off of her forehead, “Dina, I don’t have time for soldiers.”

“Sailors,” Dina correctly, grinning coyly, “They’re in the navy, Miss Adla, and so they’re called sailors.” 

She tossed her discarded gloves at Dina who squealed with laughter, “Call them what you like, I won’t be going.” 

Stella plucked her goggles off and leaned her hip on the table, appraising Adla with her eyes, like she was trying to figure out some deep rooted reason why Adla was averse to fun. She swore she wasn’t, but with her brother away at war she would never forgive herself if she wasted time being frivolous when she could be spending that time working to help him. 

She squinted in an attempt to be intimidating at Stella who only shook her head, “Adla, you work like a dog. The factory is closed at night. There is no reason for you to not come, besides your own stubborn ass.” 

Dina giggled at the expletive. Adla tried not to roll her eyes and failed. 

Stella pulled her goggles back on and reached for her a bucket of bolts, “Come or don’t come. That’s on you. But just because there is a war going doesn’t mean you get to give up your life to it. You only have one life, Adla, make sure you live it.” 

And it was those words that stuck with Adla for the rest of the work day and she slaved away over her work. They rang in her head like a taunting prediction. Yet, while her head told stay at the boarding house, her heart beckoned for her to go. 

Like some siren song. 

As a child, her father used to tell her a folktale about a siren that led sailors to their deaths. Loreley was her name. Sometimes, as a child, she used to pretend she was that siren when they went to the beaches just beyond San Fransisco and she would sing for her own sailor to fall into her deadly trap. 

She was not deadly as that siren was, but perhaps, for the night, she could ensnare a pretty young naval officer– she could almost hear Dina’s shrill voice correcting her that they were called sailors– into a dance. It would not be like the fairytales of her dreams, but, in war, sometimes a dance could be enough. 

She threw on her finest red dress and attempted to pin her wild curls up in some form of a reasonable hair style and went down to the dance hall. 

As she entered, the swell of lively music and upbeat chatter filled the room. Men in uniforms and girls in pretty dressed were everywhere. Adla tugged on her dated dress and scanned the room for her friends. She spotted Dina first. She was drenched in blue velvet and looked absolutely dazzling and the young officer that was hanging on her every word seemed to think so as well. 

He had the same tall, broad look that Johnny had and the same color skin. Or, maybe, she was just wishing to see her brother in every officer here. It had been nearly a year since she had last seen him and every proud sailor could have been her brother or maybe they knew him. 

She tugged the longing to see her brother from her heart. Tonight she would not be Johnny’s little sister; no, she would be Adla and Adla alone. 

Adla crossed to Dina and cleared her throat. Her friend spun around and squealed, throwing her arms around her friend, “Oh my dearest Miss Adla, you made it!” 

She muffled a laugh in Dina’s shoulder and unwound herself from her friend’s vice-like grip, “So it seems.”

Dina remembered the officer beside her and giggled again, “How rude of me. Miss Adla, this is Officer Herbert C. Jenkins of the United States Naval Forces. Mr. Jenkins, this is Miss Adla. She works with me over at the shipyard.”

“Is that so?” Officer Jenkins mused, smiling indulgently no doubt for Dina’s sake, “Well, Miss Adla, thank you so much for helping us boys stay safe out on the water.” 

Adla shook her head, “It’s my job, officer.”

He nodded his head and opened his mouth but before he could speak all of the joy was suddenly vacuumed out of the room. Dina’s eyes were blown wide, looking over Adla’s shoulder toward the entrance. Adla’s eyebrows knit in confusion and she turned around to see what all the fuss was about. 

There, standing in the doorway like some kind of ghostly apparition, was an officer. A white officer. 

No one spoke or moved until his congenial voice boomed, “Don’t stop your party on my account, please. I’m just looking for one of my subordinates, Officer Jenkins.” 

Dina’s hand grabbed for Herbert’s hand and Adla saw him look down at her fondly. He kindly removed his hand from Dina’s and rose it so that the party crashing officer could find him easily. “Admiral Beckett, over here, sir.” 

Admiral Beckett’s eyes snapped to Officer Jenkins and Adla felt the urge to turn around, to hide her face from him. After all, she wasn’t looking for any trouble. 

The party slowly came back to life as Admiral Beckett clicked across the room to Officer Jenkins. Adla could feel the tide of the crowd being more cautious than before, but, as this looked like official naval duty business, people tried to forget Admiral Beckett was even there. Which gave way to music and laughter once more. 

Admiral Beckett came up beside Adla, his eyes sorely focused on Officer Jenkins, but she did not look at him. There was a grin to his voice when he asked his fellow sailor, “I went looking for you earlier, Herb. You didn’t come to the officers’ dinner.” 

Officer Jenkins cleared his throat, “No offense, Phoenix, but the other officers aren’t as welcoming to me being there as you are.” 

“That’s ridiculous,” Admiral Beckett roughed out, “You’re an officer in the United States Naval Forces. Those bastards don’t have to like it but they sure as hell have to accept it.” 

Officer Jenkins laughed, “Phoenix, you came all the way down here to make a stink?” 

“No,” Admiral Beckett replied, “I came all the way down here to see if you were alright. And maybe have a drink. It was sort of stuffy back at headquarters.” 

Dina’s lip curled in a smile. Adla could tell she was feeling more and more at ease in this stranger’s presence the more he talked. She extended her hand to shake Admiral Beckett’s, the gaul of it almost had Adla yell, before Dina said, “My name is Miss Dina Staten, Admiral Beckett, and we’re happy to have you here with us.” 

Admiral Beckett straightened, Adla felt it happen as he accidentally brushed her shoulder, and shook her hand. It was a polite enough gesture, but Adla could see how tense he was and that he could tell eyes were on his every move, “Pleasure, miss.” 

She preened and tucked her hand back in Officer Jenkins’ hand, “And this is my friend, Miss Adla. She never comes out, you see, because she’s very-” 

Dina kept speaking, her mouth moving a mile a minute, but Adla could barely hear above the buzzing in her ears as she lifted her eyes and met Admiral’s Beckett’s for the first time. His eyes were warm and friendly but then they exploded into large and alarmed, as if the sight of her had given him a proper fright. She worried, stupidly, about the dated dress and the state of her curls. 

But then his eyes softened and his lips fell open just slightly, like he was forcing himself to take in air, like she had made him breathless. Adla rolled her eyes at Dina’s antics and corrected, “Just Adla is fine, Admiral Beckett.” 

The sound of her voice had his whole face lighting up in delight, which she counted as odd, and he smiled sloppy and lazy, like an untrained puppy, “Phoenix, please. Admiral Beckett is so formal.” 

“Phoenix,” Dina pipped in, “Like those birds?”

“Yes,” Phoenix nodded. He hesitated to look away from Adla, she could tell, but did give some of his attention back to Dina, “It’s said, they, uh, rise from the ashes. Death is never permanent.” 

Officer Jenkins laughed and whispered to their small group, “Phoenix is big on names and their meanings. Drives all of our men crazy.” 

Phoenix pocketed his hands and gracefully took the teasing, “Herbert means illustrious warrior, miss. So, your sailor should be fine, if names have meaning.” 

“But if names have meaning,” Adla jumped in, “Then, does that mean you’re destined to never die?” 

He tore his eyes to Adla, drinking in the sight of her. She tugged on her dress nervously to make sure it was hanging right. His eyes were so fiercely drawn to her, she could see him cataloguing every piece of the moment, storing it away for some safe place. He licked his lips, “Technically, it means I will die. Just be reborn.” 

Adla’s blood went cold. 

Dina sighed, “Oh, that sounds so romantic.” 

“Less romantic then you’d think,” Phoenix mumbled. He drifted slightly closer to Adla so their shoulder’s were brushing. She felt her skin heat up and her slid her eyes to him aghast. He was playfully and pointedly not looking at her, giving his attention to Dina where she liked it best. Adla knocked imperceptively into his shoulder. He knocked her right back. 

Adla bit her lip to stop from gawking at him. 

“What do you mean?” Dina swung her and Officer Jenkins’ entangled hands. 

Phoenix glanced at Adla with a smirk and, then, said to Dina, “It sounds lonely, don’t you think, miss?” 

“Oh no,” Dina shook her head, “Not at all. Not if you have someone to share it with.” 

“What does your name mean, Miss Adla?” Phoenix asked, whirling the question on her as if he had not heard Dina speak.

Adla did not stop herself this time, this time she opened gawked at him, “Excuse me?” 

“Your name,” he repeated, “What does it mean?”

Dina giggled. Adla ignored her. “Justice. It’s a Tanzanian word.” 

“Is that where you’re from?”

“No, sir.” Adla raised an eyebrow, “I’m an American. Born and raised here.” 

Phoenix flushed, “I didn’t mean to insinuate-” 

“Dina,” Adla said, dismissing the sailor, “I think I ought to get home. It’s getting late and we have first shift in the morning.” 

“Adla,” Phoenix whispered apologetically. 

“Officer Jenkins,” Adla turned to the bewildered officer, “It was a pleasure making your acquaintance.”

He fumbled and tipped his head, “Ma’am.” 

Lastly, she turned to Admiral Beckett and sniffed, “Admiral.” With that, she gathered what was left of her confused state and stormed across the floor and out the double doors. The night air nipped at her skin and she yanked her trench coat tighter around her shoulders. 

The click of her heels against the pavement at night was the only sound she heard until-

“Miss Adla!” Admiral Beckett’s voice rang out, disrupting the steady fall of her steps. She regained her stride and he called again, “Miss Adla!” Again, she did not stop walking. Finally, he caught up to her and wheezed, “Christ, Adla, will you slow down?”

She whirled on him and crossed her stringy arms, “Admiral Beckett, you didn’t strike me as the type to follow a lady home without her consent.” 

“That’s not,” he sighed, “I didn’t want you to part thinking so…little of me.” 

“I hardly know you, Admiral,” she cleared her throat.

His face got a strange, whimsical wisdom, like her statement itself was ludicrous and hysterical. She wanted to smack his arm for looking so pleased at the situation. “Of course,” he chuckled, “You don’t know me at all.” His face pinched up in glee. 

“Admiral, do not try my patience.” 

“Or what?” he laughed, “You’ll kill me?”

Her throat closed up and she could almost hear the squealing of horses in the distance. Like their kicks and screams were coming off of the water. Adla turned her nose up, blocking out the strange sensation that she had been here before, perhaps not exactly like this, but the moment was familiar. “Don’t,” she hushed, “Don’t say something like that. Men are dying in this war, Admiral.”

His good merry sobered up, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make light of the situation. I am a sailor, miss.” 

Again, a ringing sensation, of another moment and another time, whispered in her ear: 

I don’t want a soldier or a martyr. 

Adla swallowed, “My brother is a soldier, Admiral Beckett.” 

“Phoenix,” he said softly. “Please call me, Phoenix.” 

“Phoenix,” she relented. 

His smile was blinding. “You know,” he took off his hat and ran shaky fingers through his floppy hair, “I’m sorry we left the dance.” 

She clutched at her coat, “Why?”

“I would’ve asked you to dance,” he said. And it sounded so simple. So like a fantasy that she laughed. He looked startled by her good humor, “Adla?”

She covered her mouth to muffle the laughter, “I’m sorry, but, Admiral Beckett-”

“Phoenix,” he said more fiercely.

“Admiral Beckett, you’re white.” 

He flushed a deep red and straightened his uniform, “And?”

“And,” she went on, “even if I thought you were nice and kind and handsome…its just not reality.” 

“Don’t start,” he grumped. 

“Excuse me?” she narrowed her eyes.

Phoenix shoved his hands angrily in his pockets, “You never remember. You talk about reality but you don’t even remember your own.” 

She felt the hairs on her arms stand up, “Have we met?” 

“More than once,” his eyes searched hers for some kind of clue. She stared back, transfixed, but helplessly lost. “More than once,” he repeated, reaching for her hands, and, like an idiot, she let him take them. She did not worry about if anyone saw them or if what he was doing was proper and good. Adla was too taken in by his eyes and the overwhelming sadness buried there. 

Adla swallowed the lump in her throat, “I don’t….I’m sorry. I don’t remember ever meeting you.” 

His face fell and he dragged his hands out of her own. She blindly reached for the contact as it slipped through her fingers. “Adla, I’m so tired.” 

“Tired of what?” she asked, her voice attentive and unusually sweet. 

He looked down at her hands that were still reaching out for her own. He laced their fingers together and she felt a surge of energy she could not explain. Phoenix gripped her hands like a life line, “Of doing this over and over again.” 

“What?” she stepped closer. “The war? Going into battle?”

“No,” he said, obviously exasperated, “I mean, yes, the wars, but…I-”

He closed his mouth and she took another step closer until they were maddeningly chest to chest. “I don’t understand. Phoenix I-” And, like he had done it a hundred times before, he kissed her. Near the docks. In the moonlight. 

Adla’s eyes opened in shock, her body screaming a warning that this could only end badly, but then the softness of his mouth entreated her own and she was lost. The hands that were clinging to his own knocked off his hat and ran in wonder through his hair. It was thick and soft and so, so familiar to her. He made a desperate noise and clung to her, his hands running up and down the expanse of her back. Her spine arched into it. 

Until she heard a dog bark and she was dropped back into the moment and the dock and Adla tore herself away. Phoenix’s mouth was still puckered like he could hold onto the kiss a minute longer. 

She covered her mouth in shock, appalled at herself and her behavior. She had moved here for the war effort, not to kiss admiral’s passing through the port. Adla was better, more focused than that. Even if her mouth still tingled from his kisses. 

Adla turned her back on him and wiped away at her mouth. “Oh my god,” she muttered.

“Adla,” Phoenix’s sad voice said her name. 

“Oh my god,” she said louder and turned around to stare at him. “I shouldn’t have…you shouldn’t have…I got carried away, sir. I’m so sorry.” 

She saw his heart break in his eyes, “You got carried away? Adla, please, I’m not mad or angry or…please, don’t run away. I’ll…die.” He said that last word like it was a terribly tragic joke. 

“Such sweet words,” she spat bitterly. “You’ll die? I told you not to joke about that.” 

“Would it grieve you, if I died?” he said boldly. “Do you think you would feel it?” he said even softer. His words had the undercurrent of an apology. 

“I don’t even know you!” she shrieked. 

“Liar,” he closed the distance between them, his mouth slanting over hers and, she hated herself, but she opened for him. Their tongues exploring the other lewdly. “God damn it,” he clutched at her waist and she squeaked in pleasure, “Remember me.” 

“Admiral Beckett,” she sighed into his lips, “I think I’d remember you if we’d met.” 

He made a noise against her mouth that sounded like a sob of frustration, but she realized coldly he was crying. He was swept up in something that she was not privy to and the power of each passing moment was starting to frighten her. 

She pressed her hands against his chest, slowing down the frantic pace of their kisses, making each new one more lingering and softer than the last. “Phoenix,” she hummed, “when do you ship out?” 

“The end of the week,” he rumbled, his hands fisting in the fabric of her dress, searching, unsuccessfully, for skin. 

Adla’s breath hitched pleasantly. “Where are you boarding?” 

“On the ship, in my cabin. Why?” he kissed a hot trail down her neck and began to suck at the sweet pulse point there. Her stomach rolled over in liquid pleasure. 

Her breath came in heavy pants, “The dock is no place for this, Admiral?”

“No place for what?” he pulled down her dress slightly to expose her collar bones and, then, he lavished kisses there. 

“This,” she said, swatting at his head to get his attention away from her body and on to her voice. “Phoenix,” she chastised him, “We can’t do this here.” 

His dark eyes lightened and his senses came back to him all at once. He looked around, really taking in their location, and he turned a violent red, “I’m sorry. I…I have no excuse,” he laughed. It was a bright sound. It warmed her already hot insides. “You just…” he grabbed for her waist and tugged her close, “Alda, you have no idea.” 

She felt the press of him against her dress and rolled her eyes, “Trust me. I know.”

“We can’t go back to the ship. I don’t want my men thinking its okay to drag their sweethearts back to the boat.” His mouth wandered down her throat again, his hands an anxious and familiar friend. 

She pushed them away and took a bewildered and bedraggled step away from him, struggling for breath, “We can’t go back to my boarding house. The ladies will all lose their minds.” 

“Let them,” he groaned, taking a distracted step toward her.

She lifted her hands and pressed against his chest to keep him from getting any closer, “Your brain, Admiral Beckett. Use it.” 

“It seems, miss,” Phoenix’s eyes glimmered with amusement, “We are at an impasse.” 

Adla tipped her chin back to give off an air of authority and, mostly, to hide the grin that was threatening to explode across her mouth. There was something about Admiral Beckett that had her on the edge of a cliff, moments away from taking some dangerous plunge. She knew it was ridiculous and she was being frivolous, especially during the war, but he had her mind fuzzy and her hands warm. And there was another inching feeling that she didn’t know well enough to name bubbling inside of her and it swept over her as easily as his smile did earlier that night. 

Beautiful boys, she thought, were the most dangerous kind. 

“So it would seem,” she nodded. 

His eager hands pressed against her hips, “And we can’t go to a hotel.” 

“Heaven’s no, think of the scandal,” she teased. 

Admiral Beckett barked out a laugh. She liked making him laugh. She liked that his eyes crinkled at the creases in his face when he did so and his face scrunched up in pure, unadulterated joy. “Oh how I’d hate to be scandalous,” he remarked. 

Adla stole a kiss. The stars twinkled above them, almost like a spotlight on this moment, like the entire universe was watching with bated breath to see what happened next. “Perhaps,” she rolled the word around in her mouth, making up each word as she went along, “We could go to the shipyard. It’s late. Nobody is gonna be there at his time of night.” 

He raised his eyebrow in sharp curiosity, “Oh?”

She nodded, “Mhmm. And we’ve got a gramophone there. A nice one.” 

“Well,” he slid his hand into hers, “I did say that I wanted that dance.” 

Adla bit down on her bottom lip, keeping her excitement from showing, “So you did, Admiral.” 

It took them the better part of an hour to get back to MINSY. And it took Adla five more minutes to pick the lock on the gate. Admiral Beckett watched on impressed, “Where’d you learn to do that?” 

“My brother,” she hummed, sticking the pin she had used to open the lock back in her hair. “Johnny. He had a talent for trouble and I was always his silly kid sister chasing at his knees, wanting to do everything he did.” 

“You?” Phoenix feigned surprised, “Trouble? I doubt it very much.” 

She pushed open the gate and pulled him inside, “You shouldn’t tease a lady, sir.” 

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he said, dropping an easy kiss on the fabric bunched up on her shoulder. 

She lifted his head from her shoulder and brought it down on her lips, taking whatever kisses she could from these jolly sailor boy. Adla knew that she was playing with fire here, tonight, but she couldn’t help it. She didn’t care that he was a white officer that would probably die at sea. She wanted these moments from him like a fever. It spread through every part of her body and made her ill with wanting. 

Against her lips, he mumbled, “What about that dance?” Her laugh bubbled against his mouth and he gazed at her in utter softness and fondness, “What? You promised.” 

She shook her head and dragged him into the Rosie’s office where all the ladies gathered to eat their lunches. There, in the corner was a beautiful, genuine gramophone. Adla looked through the records and Phoenix came up behind her, dropping kisses against the curve of her neck as she looked through the artists. “How do you feel about,” she panted, “Nora Bayes?” 

“You want to dance to war propaganda?” he seared against her throat.

“No,” she arched into him, “No, I just like the way she sings.” 

He reached his hand for the record in her hands and cued it up on the machine. The usual buzz and scratch of the machine echoed in the room and then triumphant, sickeningly American horns blared. Patriotism in a song, perfectly packaged to get boys to sign up and die for country. 

He turned her around in his arms and swayed with her slowly. It fought against the very impulse of the song, to gallop and cheer. They were the softness in the eye of the storm of war. He whispered in her ear as Nora Bayes began to sing, “Johnny get your gun, get your gun, get your gun. Take it on the run, on the run, on the run. Hear them calling you and me. Everyone for liberty. Hurry right away, no delay, start today. Make your daddy glad to have had such a lad. Tell your sweetheart not to cry, be proud our boys in line.”

Adla ran her hands up into his hair as they danced. Each word feeling more and more tragic as the song scratched on. Those poor, proud little Yanks going over there to die. She felt her eyes well and she clutched him closer. He all but clung to her. 

“Do you think,” she heaved, “What I mean is…are you afraid?” 

Another voice, unfamiliar and gentle banged at her subconscious: 

MJ, he’s scared. He thinks he’s gonna die. 

Phoenix hid his face in her neck, and the record played on and on, “I’m always scared. It doesn’t get easier.” 

“What doesn’t?” she asked innocently.

He dropped a kiss on her head, “Nothing. Just…you know, its tough. Being a soldier.” 

She scratched the back of his head with her nails, a comforting gesture, “Sailor.” 

“Right,” he chuckled, “Sorry.” The song scratched to a finish and only buzz filled the room, like white noise. He held her tighter and they swayed from the sheer strength of their hug. “I am sorry,” he clarified. 

“What for?” she nuzzled into his cheek. 

He seemed to choose his words carefully, “I’m sorry that this war is going to hurt you. I never wanted that. I didn’t know.” 

“What are you talking about?” she pulled her head back to look in his eyes and her heart wept from the agony swelling there. A sadness so deep, so old and so profound she could not help but get swept up in his devastation and feel it herself. 

He brushed a lose curl out of her eyes, “Nothing.” His mouth descended on hers, probing and right. She had kissed a few boys in her day, before the war had stolen all of them away, but she had never kissed a man. And Phoenix was a man. Strong and righteous and funny and perfect. 

She knew what came next. It wasn’t proper, she thought, even if she wanted it, wanted him so much she was bursting at the seems. 

Adla sighed against his mouth, “We shouldn’t.” 

“Mm,” he moaned back, “There it is.” 

It was a peculiar thing to say, but for some reason it set Adla’s hands tugging at his hair and pulling him back to the standard issue cot in the corner where the girls’ sometimes napped during their breaks. It was narrow and ill-fit for two people, but as he pressed against every crevice of her body, Adla didn’t care. 

“We can stop,” Phoenix offered. “I know this isn’t proper. We don’t have to-”

“Would you shut up and touch me?” Adla snapped.

He needed no more encouragement. It was frantic and heady and all-consuming like she had heard from the giggling girls at the factory that it would be. And once they had brushed aside enough of their clothes to push together it was freedom. This was what they were fighting for in the god-forsaken war. This bliss. This was the American dream. Adla saw it now as he pushed stars in her eyes. 

Every stroke brought them closer to dreams. Reality was far less beautiful. And when she broke apart, the cry of his name on her lips, Phoenix tumbled after. 

The basked in the sensation of each other, after, their hands pressing into one another for want of just the simple pleasures of touch. 

Phoenix shuttered, “I love you.” 

Adla huffed, nuzzling her nose into his shoulder, “You’re just saying that.” 

He tilted her chin up to kiss her lips. It was breathtakingly sweet, “Whatever you say.” 

They spent the next week on that cot, blocking out the world around them. Every night they snuck into the little office that was their haven and every night they lied to themselves to pretend that this could last forever. 

It wouldn’t. 

Their last night before he shipped out, as they lay together, Phoenix ran a finger down her sternum. She snuggled him in delight in her half-asleep state. “Adla?” he whispered, but she was too tired to properly respond. She was in that perfect place between dreaming and wakefulness. That was when she heard him muse, “Maybe distance helps. I’ll be overseas when it happens and, god, Adla, I hope you don’t feel it. Or if you do….its not like Russia. I couldn’t stand to…if I could spare you this pain, you know I would.” 

His voice was so faint she could almost imagine that she dreamed it, but those words stuck with her as they woke the next morning and he kissed her closed hands. It shook her to the core and forced her mouth against his in one final, beseeching kiss. “On your way, sailor,” she clung to him. Phoenix took a pin, some kind of medal for valor, off of his uniform and pressed it into her fist. She shook her head, “Phoenix, no.” 

“Adla,” he cleared his throat, “I’ll likely die over there and, well, it would give me some comfort to know that you have a piece of me after I’m gone.” 

“Don’t think like that-”

He closed her hand over the medal, “Grant me this kindness, will you?” 

The medal was cold and uncomfortable in her hand. It was nothing like the warmth of the man standing before her, solid and proud. She didn’t want the medal, she realized in shock, she wanted him. 

“Stay,” she commanded.

He sucked in a breath like he knew this was request was coming, “Adla.” 

“No. Damn you, Phoenix. Stay.” 

He stepped back, “Abandon my men? I couldn’t. I can’t…that’s not…” He struggled, “That’s not how this goes.” 

“Why not?” she gawked at him. “Why not?”

“Adla, don’t make our last moments this. Please. I beg of you.” 

“You know you make no sense, Admiral. Talking in circles. Saying nonsense. Talking about Russia??”

He stiffened, “What do you know about Russia?” 

“Nothing.” The medal in her hand warmed to the touch and she wanted to throw it in his face. He looked half-relieved and half-distraught that Russia meant nothing to her. She knew that they were fighting against Russia in the war. Perhaps, she thought, that was what he meant by Russia. Perhaps that was where he was going to fight, where he thought he would die. 

“Adla,” he grabbed her upper arms, an embrace so passionate and strong that her knees almost gave out. “Adla, I promise you. This…this is not the end.” 

I promise you– I fucking promise you, Em– I will find you in the next life. 

“But it is,” she yanked herself from of him. “You have to go. And I have to stay. And that’s the way this works. That’s what you’ve chosen. So, on your way, sailor.” 

He looked like he wanted to say so much more, like there were truths playing at his lips screeching to be let free. Instead of telling her them, instead of giving her the answers she wanted, he tipped his head, put on his hat and left her behind. 

Once he was gone, she stumbled backward into the cot and cried. Hugging herself tightly like it would keep all of the broken pieces he left behind in tact. That was how Dina found her as the girls started to file in for work. 

Her friend sat beside her, wrapped her up in her arms and whispered, “Why are you crying, Miss Adla?” 

“He left me to die.” The bastard.

The Great War ended on November 11, 1918. Admiral Phoenix Beckett’s boat was blown out of the water by an enemy ship on November 8, 1918. 

And Adla felt it. 

She was bent over her station, working her fingers to death on the bolts on a new engine, when every atom in her body seemed to combust all at once. It was contained underneath her skin and so the agony had no where to go but to radiate in her.

She knocked the bucket of bolts off the table as she collapsed. Her friends were at her side in a minute as she choked and coughed and screamed and slammed at her chest. Pounded at her heart. She needed the pain there to stop. It hurt. It hurt so badly. 

Adla, in her helpless state, fumbled for the medal she hid in her breeches and clutched it to her chest. People were screaming her name. She knew it. But she could only hear the vague scratching of the Nora Bayes record on that damn gramophone from the first night she kissed Admiral Phoenix Beckett. It looped on and on and on in her head as the pain refused to ebb and die. 

She blacked out from the intensity of it.

When she woke she was on that damned cot that she and Phoenix had made their little home for the week he had stolen refuge in her arms. She wearily sat up, her stomach turning at the effort. Dina clutched her hand, “Adla?”

She held his medal so tightly that it made her hand ache. “I could have saved him.” 

Adla fell back on the cot and covered her ears with her hands as the gramophone sang in the corner: 

Johnny get your gun, get your gun, get your gun. Take it on the run, on the run, on the run. Hear them calling you and me. Everyone for liberty. Hurry right away, no delay, start today. Make your daddy glad to have had such a lad. Tell your sweetheart not to cry, be proud of our boys in line.


	6. michelle and peter

This is the life she remembers.

  
Not all at once, but it comes to her in waves, at first like daydreams. She remembers Rome first when she’s ten years old, and then England at eleven, and France by twelve, and Russia when she’s twelve and a half, and by the time she remembers their last life she’s convinced it’s real. She knows in her heart that these memories she has are more than daydreams, they are her past, and whoever this boy is going to be in this lifetime is going to be her future.

She’s fourteen years old when she gets accepted to Midtown High for special students. She’s fourteen years old when she storms into Midtown High and stumbles right into Peter Parker.  
She wants to yell at the idiot that knocked all of her books out of her hands, but when she looks up she has no words. That’s a lie, she has two, “It’s you.”

He knits his eyebrows together in confusion and gives her the same sloppy grin he’s worn in every life, “Sorry, do I know you?”

Her heart drops in her stomach at the sickening realization that he doesn’t know her, he doesn’t remember. Fate’s greatest cosmic joke.

She picks the broken pieces of her heart off of the ground and shoulders into him without another word to go and cry in the bathroom.

She locks herself in a stall and sobs. For all the pain in all her lives, this was the most acute. Michelle had never considered, not really, how painful it had to have been for Peter in all of their lives before to look in familiar eyes he loved so much and to see nothing but unknowing stares back. It damn near destroyed her.

MJ hates this curse. She hates that for no particular reason fate flips the roles around on her. Why this life? Why now?  
Why them?

Once she’s cried herself raw, she picks herself up, dries her face with a scratchy, cheap towel and decides to throw herself head first into school. She’s a freshman in 2015. The world is her oyster. There is more to this life than loving Peter Parker; there has to be because he doesn’t even remember her. In this life, she can find a new purpose: to educate herself.

She’s never been to school. She’s had a smattering of homeschooling over her many lives, but education for girls was always scarce and inconsistent. She remembers when science was hailed as witchcraft. This world, this time, is better than that.

Well, mostly.

MJ is less than impressed with social progress. The world is still always at war and people would rather fight over differences then celebrate similarities. She’s lived long enough that this exhausts her and she’s only fourteen, which is why she goes home from school that day and announces to her family that she’s decided to dedicate her life to social justice.

This life she knows better, this life she can do better, and this life she will.

Michelle’s new found mission of saving the world from its stupid self does not go over super well with her classmates. High school, even an academically superior one, is not a conducive environment for breaking status quo and Michelle defies every single convention she can.

She’s never lived a life with makeup and so she refuses to start now. And she’s fine being somewhat of any outsider. She’s lived plenty of lives with plenty of friends. She is not lonely, she is motivated and fierce and brilliant and driven to make the most out of this life she is given.

The only habit she cannot seem to shake it watching Peter. It’s nearly impossible not to look at him with his nearly auburn hair and heartbreakingly familiar sloppy smile. She always finds her eyes drifting to him in every class or sketching him at academic decathlon practice and when his Uncle Ben dies the middle of their freshman year she gives him a fleeting hug in the hallway before scurrying off to hide in shame. She doesn’t miss how the brief contact makes her skin burn for the rest of the day.

She also doesn’t miss how sometime after his Uncle Ben dies Peter Parker starts hitting the gym. She sees him try and hide it under his baggy sweaters and his ill-fitting jeans, but she can tell. There is no person on the planet that knows his body better than she does.

And this transformation coupled with some confidence due to a sudden and very prestigious internship with Tony Stark puts Peter Parker on people’s radar, which bothers Michelle. She knows people pretend they aren’t interested in him but she sees the way both boys and girls alike start to watch him, hoping he’ll turn his fierce, loyal gaze on them.

MJ is not immune to the wandering eye and neither is Liz Allen-Toomes, which shouldn’t make her flare with jealousy but it does. She has known him, every part of him, for each of his lifetimes and the thought of someone else getting to know this version of Peter is almost crippling.

And then, Peter’s eye shifts to Liz, too.

It’s like fate is having fun torturing her in this life. She wonders if there were lives that Peter had to watch her fall in love with someone else, but she sorely doubts it. In every life they have ever lived, Peter pursues her. He loves her so dearly and distractedly that he never waits to make his intentions clear.

Michelle is different. She hesitated that first day they met. Instead of opening up to him or smiling at him in that way that said hey, its you, and I love you, she ran.

She turned inward on herself and became an advocate for free speech and change instead of picking him and most days she doesn’t regret it, but others are harder.

Especially when she overhears he’s Spider-Man. This life brought on more changes then just the script being flipped on which one of them remembers their past lives. In this life, MJ sees ordinary men become Gods. She hates that she cannot help but think back on Egypt and wonder if this new breed of superhero is actually the Gods walking the earth once more. It’s ridiculous. She’s a woman of science. And yet.

But of course, in the world’s most epic war to date, Peter would somehow get himself wrapped up in battle. After she hears him and Ned chatting lowly about his new powers, she notices how he’s always longing for battle, to throw himself head first into danger like every life before this one, and she can’t help but curse him for his stupid, honorable nobility. You don’t have to fight, she wants to scream at him every time he misses decathlon, but she refrains.  
Mostly because, in this life, he doesn’t know her very well.

At Homecoming, he wanders in with Liz and her heart flares in such anger that she slaps a sardonic smile on her face and shoots him the finger. It only makes her feel better for half a second. Her relief is short lived when she sees him rush out of the school gym, away from the dance and away from Liz. Whatever he is running to, she thinks, could kill him.

That, at least, remains the same from life to life.

She spends the rest of the dance gnawing on her fingernails in worry and when her phone alerts her about the attack on Coney Island Pier she almost faints until she sees the one god-sent line: Spider-Man Apprehends Armed Weapons Dealer.

He’s alive.

Michelle’s knees give out on the dance floor. Sally is at her side before she hits the ground and she whispers a thank you.

Sally tugs her under her arm and squishes MJ, “You need to eat something. Can’t have you passing out at the dance.”

MJ’s eyebrows knit, “Why are you helping me?”

Sally glances back at the academic decathlon team and, then, smiles down at MJ flopped lazily in her arms, “Because we’re friends.”

So, its easy the next day at decathlon practice to correct Mr. Harrington, “My, uh, friends call me MJ.”

She avoids looking directly at Peter when she says that. Even so, she can feel the heat of his gaze on her face. He’s looking at her, for the first time, like he sees her and she’s terrified if she looks at him, if they meet eyes, the bubble will burst and the moment will be gone.

His phone rings and destroys the moment all on its own. He distractedly looks down at his phone and starts to spin off the bench, “Uh, I gotta go.”

“Hey, where are you going?” she pushes, leaning forward on the table. He vaguely points behind himself, like his gesturing is enough of an answer to her question. She raises her eyebrow and asks, “What are you hiding, Peter?” His mouth falls open and she can spot a sheen of sweat starting to pool on his forehead. Ned even tenses beside her. She snorts, “I’m just kidding, I don’t care. Bye.”

He looks shaken by the exchange, but he gathers his things and hops off to save the world or whatever it is the Avengers are doing today. As he walks away, she can’t help herself, she gazes at his back. Her insides screaming for him to turn around and look at her. Come on, sweetheart, her heart cries, just look at me.

He doesn’t.

When he comes back to school the next day he seems unburdened as if the world is clear blue skies for him again. He jogs up beside her in the hallway and grins, “Hey, MJ, wait up.”

She steels her heart and rolls her eyes, “I’m walking, Parker. Keep up.”

He takes two long strides until they’re walking together in unison. He’s effervescent, “I, uh, didn’t really get to congratulate you yesterday. And I didn’t want to, you know, make you think just because I ran off I’m not proud of you or whatever.”

“Proud of me?” she drawls, “Why would I care if you’re proud of me?”

“We’re friends,” he says like its the simplest explanation in the world. Her heart hastens.

She swallows the lump in her throat, “Are we?”

“Yea,” he smiles, “So when I say congrats on making team captain a normal, average friend would say thank you.” He teases, “Go on and try. I promise its not that hard.”

She bites on her lip to keep her smile hidden, “Thank you, Peter.”

He dips his head in a pseudo bow, “You’re welcome, Michelle.”

She can’t help herself, she laughs. And he looks like he’s been clobbered over the head with a bat at the sound. Self-conscious and shy, she tucks some of her bangs behind her ear, “What?”

“Nothing!” he shakes his head free of whatever cobwebs are taking up free storage in his brain, “You just, uh, you have a nice laugh.”

Her insides warm, “Oh?”

“Yea,” he squints like he’s trying to piece together some great puzzle. She remembers in their previous lives she used to call all of Peter’s vague nonsense riddles. She dampens the hope in her heart that maybe he is smarter than she is and he can put together the pieces of their missing puzzle and remember her.  
She still foolishly hopes beyond hope for them.

Yet, while she hopes he finds some way back to remembering her, she wishes more than anything that he’ll stop being Spider-Man. Michelle knows what its like to lose him– she’s done it more times than anyone should ever have to lose their soul mate– and the thought of it happening again is paralyzing. Especially because Peter Parker is good.

Marcus had told her once that he was not a good person and, as Femi, she had believed him. But Peter Parker? Peter Parker is the definition of goodness. He is everything good in this world wrapped up in one slightly goofy teenage boy and even if she didn’t have several lifetimes worth of love for him she’s certain she would fall in love with him anyway. He’s perfect.

However, perfection seems uninterested in Michelle Jones. Not that she tries to move beyond being friends with Peter Parker. After she becomes president of decathlon, Peter seems to promote them to school friends but nothing more. She’s not indoctrinated into his super, secret life with Ned or invited to weekend movies or even a study party at the Parker residence. Their friendship is confined to the walls of Midtown High and, frankly, Michelle is glad.

It’s damn near impossible to keep the stars out of her eyes whenever Peter is within fifteen feet of her and she is praying he doesn’t notice. So, during decathlon practice she’s taking to blatantly ignoring him.

She is two hundred pages deep in The Awakening when Peter slams her book closed. MJ jumps back so the pages don’t nip at her fingers and she tilts her chin up to glare at him, “What gives, Parker?”

“Have I done something?” Peter leans down so they are practically nose to nose. MJ’s stomach turns; she has to kill the overwhelming need to kiss him.

Michelle crunches her eyebrows together, “I don’t-”

“Because,” he talks over her, “I thought we were friends, but lately you’ve been literally ignoring me. So, uh, have I done something?”

MJ yanks her book out from under his hand. He flushes in embarrassment as she shoves it in her bag. “I haven’t been ignoring you,” she lies.

Peter doesn’t look convinced and she can’t quite meet his eye because he’s right. In fact, she has made it a habit to ignore Peter Parker because he makes her heart beat out of her chest. He sits on the edge of her desk, “You have.” His face falls, “I really did think we were friends, MJ. Or, uh, at least on our way to being…friends.”

Michelle sighs, “We are friends.”

He perks up, “Great. Friends go to the movies together, right?”

The suggestion sounds suspiciously like a date. MJ startles. “W-what?”

Peter’s lip curls upward, “Great. Glad that’s settled. See you Saturday.” And Peter Parker has the audacity to wink at her. Her mouth falls open from the shock. She fumbles for some witty remark or some coherent thought to piece out what exactly happened but she cannot think fast enough to speak before he is gone.

Later that night he sends her a text that reads: i’ve been trying to ask you out for months, fyi.

It feels like the start of some Shakespearean tragedy, one she has lived too many times already, but in spite of how she knows this has to end, MJ curls over that night and smiles.

She goes through five different outfits before she settles on a black girl magic t-shirt and jeans. It is understated and easy movie watching attire, besides she does not want to get her hopes up for this date. If its a group date or if, somehow, she misunderstood his intentions she does not want to have her dreams dashed. It is self-preservation plain and simple.

Peter gives her the dopiest, most endearing smile when she arrives outside the theater. He reads the lettering on her shirt and grins, if possible, even bigger. “I like the shirt,” he remarks.

She eats the compliment up and stores it away to examine and re-examine to death later. “Thanks,” she tucks some hair behind her ear, “I got it in DC.”

“At decathlon?” he innocently asks.

MJ nods. “Yea, you know,” her smile turns feral, “after you disappeared and before Spider-Man showed up to save the day.”

He swallows thickly, “We were, uh, very lucky he was there that day.”

“Or she,” she teases.

Peter shakes his head, “No, Spider-Man is definitely a guy.”

“Could be a girl,” she shrugs. Keeping her eyes on his reactions, she adds, “I’ve heard their voice is kind of high.”

He scowls, “No way. I’ve heard it’s crazy manly and, like, intimidating.”

She laughs out loud at her own private joke and he looks confused but the sound of her laugh makes him smile back. It is such a simple gift, she thinks, spending time with someone who thinks her laugh is worth smiling about. In every life, she remembers him smiling at everything she did. She had taken it for granted. In this life, she did not intend to; she would cherish him and every minute they had left.

Peter, emboldened by her laugh, reaches for MJ’s hand. The laugh dies on her lips and she turns to him, eyes blown wide in terror. He is so soft with her. Gentleness comes as easily to him as breathing does to everyone else. “What is it?” he asks.

She gnaws on her lip, “I, just, I didn’t know you liked me, is all.”

It is his turn to tease her, “Who said I liked you?” MJ swipes at his arm and his face explodes in a sunny grin. “Kidding,” he clarifies, “I definitely do.” His face turns red but he does not try to explain away his comment. He lets it sit between them, the truth laying between the space between their interlocked hands.

MJ squeezes his hand, “I, uh, like you, too.”

“Oh,” he shrugs, “I know.” Her eyebrows shoot up into her hair, offended. He continues, “You spent way too much time in decathlon pretending I wasn’t there. So, you know, you either hated me or liked me a lot. And when you showed up today…I figured it had to be the second one.”

“Oh yeah?” she scoffs, trying to pull her hand out of his grip.

“Yeah,” he smirks, inching closer to her face. This is the sort of bold move that Peter would have pulled in a past life. He was always aching to kiss her or touch her or have some kind of deep, personal connection with her at any given moment. When she thinks back on their previous lives he always steals their first kiss relatively early on in their courtship– something that scandalized her in some lives and thrilled her in others.

In this life, his presumptive action makes her mouth dry and her head spin until the very last second before his lips hit hers. And when, at last, he slants his mouth over hers the cosmos opens before them. A kiss has never felt as enlightening and life-changing in any life before this one. This is the kind of kiss that won wars and made great cities fall; this was the kind of kiss that civilizations built their foundations on; and, the kind of kiss that tasted like regret and agony and deep, deep love.

When MJ pulls back, her lips turn upward and her eyes flutter open to reveal Peter’s shell-shocked face. Whatever she expects him to say it is not what comes next:

“I remember.”

Her blood chills, “Excuse me?”

He takes two steps back from her, his eyes pinched in pain. She sees all of the memories rushing back to him, several lifetimes flooding back into his system. Whatever is happening to him is sensory overload and he doubles over in pain.  
MJ grabs his torso to keep him upright. And then, he starts to yell. Scream, actually. It hurts. She knows the kind of pain that fate can shackle to them and it destroys her to watch it happen to him.

On-lookers look on in vague concern as MJ rocks him back and forth in her arms and whispers, “Shh, its okay, I’m here. Peter, it’s okay. Tell me how to help.”

When he starts to cry loud, woeful tears, Michelle leads him back to her car and ushers him into the passenger seat. She lays his head in her lap over the gear shift with some maneuvering. He shakes with the pain until, finally, an hour later it stops.

He heaves like he might throw up and Michelle kisses his sweaty forehead. Her voice is soft, “Peter, are you okay?”

Once he has regained his faculties, he woozily lies, “I’m fine.”

“No,” she shakes her head, “You’re not.” She squashes the hope that he might remember. While his reaction was an extreme one it did not mean for certain that he regained any of his memories, she lies to herself. He had said that he remembered but that could have meant anything, she reasons. Another lie.

He keeps his head in her lap and mutters, “God, that sucked.”

“What sucked?” she prods.

He turns his head so that he is looking up at her and she sees the war in his eyes. She sees him measuring something and she wonders, if he has remembered, if he is thinking that this life is like the past lives and she does not remember him. Or remember what they have been through together.

Peter settles on, “My stomach ache.”

“Your stomach ache?” Michelle whispers. Those three words had dashed her hopes to pieces. Perhaps it was wishful thinking to hope that he had remembered. Wishful, stupid-

“Do you remember?” he asks. His eyes are searching hers desperately and sadly for answers. The flickering in his eyes match the feeling of dread she feels whipping up in her stomach, like he is as frightened as she is and it is drowning him down in torturous worry.

Michelle bites her lip and takes the plunge. She nods. Color returns to Peter’s pale face and he forces himself out of her lap so they are sitting face to face. Her eyes well with tears and she tries to banish them away but they keep coming until she is crying in earnest. “I remember,” she finally says, putting him out of his misery.

Peter chokes on a sob and pulls her mouth roughly against his own. They are crying and kissing and, for the first time in any lifetime, they both remember. It is not a welcome relief. It feels like this moment of clarity could be ripped away from them at any moment and Michelle is terrified.

She grips onto his shirt and fists it in her hands. He deepens their kiss.

“I missed you,” he huffs against her cheek as he begins to kiss down her face to the column of her neck. “Fuck, I missed you. And you were here the whole time.”

“It killed me to see you with Liz,” she admits. “It killed me to see you happy with anybody but me.”

“Never,” he assures her, sucking on the pulse point on her neck that has her mewling in acute pleasure. “There is nobody but you for me. Oh god, MJ.”

“Peter,” she replies. “Oh, Peter,” she sighs. He bites down on her shoulder and something in her snaps. She climbs over the gear shift and straddles his lap. This is a game that their bodies know well, a connection that exists over lifetimes and wars and time.

He flattens his hands on her back and pulls her flush against him. “MJ,” he growls, “You’re-” He suddenly pulls out of their kiss and gasps. “MJ,” he repeats softer.

“Yes?” she says impatiently, trying to pull his lips back to her. He refuses.

She pouts. He looks up at her in amusement and lands a peck on her pouting mouth, “You’re cute.”

“Then, why did you stop kissing me?” she runs her hands down his chest. He grabs her wandering hands and kisses her knuckles. It is such pure gesture that her heart expands with warmth.

Peter runs his thumbs over her knuckles and watches his handiwork, reacquainting himself with the simple joys of her touch. “I’ve called you Michelle and MJ before. Not in this life…but the past ones.”

She is so pliant and warm and happy that she beats away the bells of dread of his words with a wooden bat. Choosing instead to revel in the happiness of this moment, “Did you know? Do you know, I mean? How this life goes?”

He shakes his head, “No. It’s hard to explain.”

“Try,” MJ says.

He kisses her knuckles again like he cannot stay away, “I used to get these, I don’t know how to explain it, echoes, I guess. In my head. I’d hear things, conversations in my mind, things I hadn’t lived yet. So…when I called you Michelle in France…I-I swear, I didn’t know we would end up here. It’s hard to explain.”

Michelle forces herself to look at him, in eyes that now remembered her and knew her and, possibly, loved her. “I know what you mean,” she admits, “I used to get those whispers, too. Of things that hadn’t happened yet. I remember in Russia, before I died, my last thought was your name.”

“Dmitry?”

“No,” she shakes her head, “Peter.”

He brushes her hair reverently back behind her ear. “MJ,” Peter swallows, “MJ, I have to….I have to tell you something.”

Michelle shakes her head and pulls him back in by the scruff of his shirt to kiss along his jawbone. It had been tormenting her for years, jutting out enough to tempt her but staying firmly out of her reach, and now she wants to make up for long, lost time. It always comes back to time for them. “It can wait,” she bemoans impatiently.

“No,” he hisses when she sinks her teeth into the patch of skin under his chin. “MJ, damn it, I’m trying to talk.”

“I don’t know why,” she complains. She dips her hands underneath his shirt and runs her deft fingers up his superhuman torso. Some things are the same life to life but this is a new adventure and one she plans to map out with her tongue.

Peter gulps, “Em, you’re distracting me.”

“Apparently not,” she quips, “You’re still talking.”

His muscles strain as he unwillingly pulls her away from him, “MJ, please.” The pleading in his voice makes her listen. She sits back in the driver’s seat and gives him a chance to breathe. Michelle is outrageously proud he wrecked he looks from a simple make-out session. “I…there’s something you should know about me. In this life, I mean. It’s hard to explain and I can’t even believe it sometimes. It’s, like, awesome, don’t get me wrong, but weird. Not that it’s as weird as being reborn every a hundred or so years. Basically, what I’m trying to say-“

“You’re Spider-man,” she finishes for him.

His eyes blow up to the size of drive-in movie projectors. “You know?”

“Please, Peter. You and Ned don’t know how to whisper.”

He looks besotted with her, she revels in the feeling. “You’re brilliant. You know that?”

“Mm,” she jokingly ponders and throws her leg back over his lap to settle on him. He doesn’t hesitate snaking his hand up the curve of her back this time. She purrs, “Say it again?”

“You’re brilliant,” he whispers and kisses her neck. “You’re wonderful,” he observes and kisses the corner of her mouth. Her breath hitches. “You’re gorgeous,” and he ghosts a kiss against her mouth.

MJ nudges her nose against his, “And you’re stalling.” He winks at her and the time for talking is done. They have a lot more to discuss but, for now, they decide to give in to the present because everything beyond this moment feels less than certain. It feels fragile because at any moment it could be taken away from them.

They walk into school the next day with their fingers intertwined and MJ tries not to fall into the comfortable, normal feeling it elicits in her stomach. This life is easier than the previous ones without question. From things as rudimentary as indoor plumbing to things as revolutionary to her as the Black Lives Matter movement, this feels like the kind of life they could be happy in.

Except, Peter’s Avenging looms a gigantic, red flag over their potential happiness. It’s a bloody red, too. The same red that dripped through her fingers when she ran Dmitry through with her knife. MJ does not have nightmares, she has memories instead.

Ned notices their hands first and freaks out. To be exact, he shouts at the top of his lungs when he sees them. MJ scowls. Ned trips into them, grabs their hands and lifts them in the air like they have won a boxing match and Michelle tries to wiggle her hand free, but its too late. The entire hallway has seen them.

Peter is immune to embarrassment in this respect. In every life, he’s stupidly proud of being seen on MJ’s arm. It would be endearing if she was not so mortified.

“AH!” Ned yells, “LOOK AT THIS! LOOK AT IT!”

Peter laughs. MJ’s frown deepens.

“Okay,” Peter pulls their hands down mercifully, “That’s enough, Ned.”

Ned throws his arms around his friends, squishing them into his chest in a hug, “This is, no exaggeration, the greatest thing that’s ever happened.”

Peter raises his eyebrow, “I thought the other thing was the best thing that ever happened to you?”

Ned shakes his head, “Nope. I’ve changed my mind. It’s this.”

It is impossible to avoid the stares of the rest of her classmates after a display like that. The rest of the day drags by in thinned veiled questions about her new relationship and occasional squealing from Sally and Cindy.

And Ned.

Peter takes it in stride because he’s wonderful but it feels suffocating to Michelle. She is not one for spotlight or prolonged attention. The only person she has ever wanted to give her a kernel of attention is Peter Parker.

He senses her discomfort and nudges her in decathlon practice, “You okay?” She exhales. He nods, “Cool. So no.” Michelle shakes her head. His hand finds hers under the table and its ridiculous how calming his touch is to her. “You want to get out of here?”

“No,” she speaks, “No, I’m okay.”

“It’s okay if you’re not,” he reasons. “I’ll only judge you a little.”

His face gets that goofy, teasing smile that makes her roll her eyes but smile all the same. “I hate you,” she says.

He mouths, “No you don’t.” And he is right.

It is the last, beautiful glimmering moment before it all goes to shit. She wishes she would have known that at the time; she would have held on to it longer and cataloged every, single minute.

Ned’s phone lights up. He distractedly reaches for it and glances at the message written there. Then, he looks at it harder. MJ feels her stomach drop as the hateful grip of fate latches on to the back of her neck. Ned spins to look at Peter.

Cindy’s phone beeps. Then, Sally’s phone. And Abe’s and Peter’s and, finally, hers. She shakes but conjures the strength to pull it out of her pocket.

There is an alert. A state-wide alert for people to go home and find shelter. Someone, something called Thanos has touched down in Manhattan and is killing people by the hundreds. She feels Peter stiffen beside her.

And she thinks, no. No, god, not like this.

He turns his eyes to her and they are so defeated she wants to hold him, but then his resolve steels and she sees him move right past the grieving stage to acceptance. He is going to do something recklessly stupid.

The team starts to call their parents and scatter out of the room, but MJ is planted in her seat. Safety is not a High School, safety is the loving embrace of family and friends.

“MJ,” Peter says, “We have to go. I have to get you home.”

“No,” she shakes her head, “No, I’m coming with you.”

“MJ, I don’t have time to argue with you!” his voice rips. His phone vibrates with another new message. She doesn’t want to know what the Avengers are asking him to do. She already knows the answer. They want him to die.

“Then, don’t,” she challenges. “Peter, please.” He wars with himself, she sees it, but ultimately he gives her a gift—he offers his hand. And she takes it.

They rush back to the Parker residence and its, mercifully, empty. She does not need May listening in on whatever fight might erupt between them. Screaming about past lives and Roman centurions can not be explained away. Peter locks the front door. If an alien decides to demolish the building, locking a door will not protect them, but if it gives him a feeling of control over this situation she won’t kill that feeling. Sometimes the perception of safety is as important as actual safety.

“Peter,” she whispers, “Peter, I know what you’re thinking. Please-“

“They need me, MJ. Tony needs me.”

“You’re not even an adult. How can he ask you-?”

“What do you know about it?” he cuts her off bitterly. “This isn’t a game, MJ. People are dying.”

“That doesn’t mean that you have to!” she pleads. She reaches out for him, but falls short when he steps out of her range.

“How many times do I have to die for you before you get it?” he shouts and the room shakes with the fury of lives lived and lost.

MJ narrows her eyes and pushes at him lamely with her forefinger, “I never asked you to die for me, you stupid, bullheaded-”

“This is how the story goes, Em. Every life. Every time. You can’t keep me from fighting, just like you can’t keep me from dying, just like you could never,” his eyes soften, “never keep me from loving you.” She wipes away angry, hot tears. He presses on, grabbing her hands with a ferocity of a hundred years of love and war, “I promise you– I fucking promise you, Em– I will find you in the next life.”

“I want you in this one,” she yanks her hands out of his reaching grip. “I don’t want a soldier or a martyr.” They are careening toward an inevitability and all she can do is hold on to this moment and rage against fate. He may have given up, but she can’t. She won’t. “You’re not an Avenger, Peter. You don’t owe them a damn thing.”

He wipes a lose curl out of his eyes and smiles in that sad, infuriating, all-knowing way that he has done in every life they have shared, “But I am Spider-man. And that means I have to go.”

“It’s a trap, Peter.” She repeats it softer, “It’s a trap.”

“It’s not a trap,” he corrects her, “It’s my duty. I have these powers for a reason, MJ. And if I don’t do everything in my power to save them….what’s the point?” He looks so certain and so defeated that

MJ wants to scream. So she does. She screams so loudly it feels like it claws out of her chest and echoes into eternity.

He scrambles for her and she can vaguely feel his hands grabbing her shoulders to steady her, to be her rock in the middle of a listless ocean of feeling. His words reach her gently, “Breathe with me, MJ. Breathe. In and out.”

Femi, breathe with me. Femi. You have to breathe with me. It’s okay. In and out. In and out.

She grips onto his hands and sucks in gulps of air, which does nothing except make her more anxious, more frantic. He shakes his head and coaxes a sweetness out of her that only exists in his arms, “Michelle, my beautiful girl, breathe.”

And she does.

She shutters at the simple freedom of her lungs filling with oxygen and he looks so relieved that she wants to smack him. This peace can only be short lived if he’s determined to go off and die, like always. “If you do this,” she hiccups, “I’ll never forgive you.”

He steels himself, she knows what he looks like when he’s going off to battle and it is the look he adopts now, before he says, “I can lose you today…so long as I don’t lose you forever.”

“So what?” she shrieks, “The plan is to hope in our next life I forget? That way this conversation never mattered. You go off and die and I’m supposed to just deal with it?”

“Damn it, Michelle,” he yanks her into his chest and drops a furious kiss on her parted lips. She bites him, not melting into the familiar softness of his lips, however tempting. He reels backward from the assault and, then, his eyes darken.

She feels her palms sweating. She knows this look. This look is always the beginning of their circle of tragedy. “Don’t,” she whispers. She’s not sure what she’s asking him. Don’t come any closer. Or don’t stop. It feels like a little bit of both.

He decides to risk her wrath, even welcome it, when he closes the distance between them, tips her head back and licks a kiss into her mouth. She hates how pliant she is to him. She hates how she bends and snaps under the pressure of his hands. She hates how desperately she loves him.

Her voice is a ragged, emotional mess when she hisses, “Let me save you, you stupid idiot!”

He easily lifts her off the ground and she brackets her thighs around his back. His chin is tilted up to kiss her as she hovers over his face dropping kisses to every inch of exposed skin. She briefly wonders if perhaps the reason he always dies is because she loves him into ruins, ravages his body until there is nothing left for him to do but die.

She feels tears on her face and she’s not sure which of them is crying, she suspects the pair of them. MJ clings to him tighter.

His hands slid up the jagged bones of her spine until they brace at the back of her neck and, oh, it’s good. It’s always so good. “Peter,” she runs her fingers through his thick curls.

A primal growl rumbles from his chest and her back suddenly hits the wall of his bedroom with a thud. She’s breathless and he’s distraught and they kiss like the world could implode and they would scarcely notice.

She has always loved him, she supposes, but never like this. He may be the super-powered one, but under the attention of his hands she feels invincible. In this life, she knows better, she knows how this ends and she still wants him.

He wants her too, she can tell, because he rips her clothing away like a fever dream. Her head drops back against the wall and he makes work of her clothes and she stares at the ceiling seeing deep, vibrant colors. Red when he bites at her neck. Blue when his hand moves between them. And white when he works her into the fastest release of any lifetime.

They suck in air once the aftershocks of rapture start to fade and seep past their muscles into their bones and, finally, into their memory. Michelle rolls over to look at him and she thinks offhandedly that his hair is a floppy, tangled mess. The way she had tugged at it did it no favors.

He smiles sleepily and sated. It’s that soft, serene look that pushes her to wrap her arms around his middle and press her nose into his chest. He leaves a lopsided kiss on her head and she radiates happiness that edges on tragedy. It cannot last, this tentative peace between them. “Peter?” she runs a searching finger down his torso and his muscles tighten.

He reaches for her hand and drags it upwards to the safety of his chest. Any lower and the game will begin again, she knows it. “Hmm?” he kisses her thumb.

Michelle lip quirks, “That was the best first go of that we’ve ever had.”

He rumbles a roaring laugh, it shakes her willowy frame tucked into his chest, “Is that right?”

“Oh yea,” she nips at his neck and is pleased when he sighs, “Way better.”

“I dunno,” he muses, tilting his chin up to the ceiling to stare at the muted colors painted there. “Egypt was pretty good.”

Wolfishly, she grins, “The vanity at the ballet wasn’t half bad either.”

“Half bad?” he feigns upset and rolls her over onto her back. She squeals in laughter and offhandedly thinks that the intimacy between them is always good, but the fact that they laugh together is the best. It has been so long since she’s laughed like this– unburdened and joyful.

MJ kisses his chin once he settles on top of her and she spots him gazing down at her with over a hundred years of love flowing between them. It fills her heart with so much feeling it threatens to burst. The depth of emotion between them is almost too much for her seventeen year old chest. Fear clutches at the edges of her subconscious and it begs her to protect him, to keep him safe.

He sees the shadow of despair cross her features and he kisses her nose, “Come back to me, Em. Come back.” Her eyes prickle with tears and she turns her head in the pillow to hide them there. “Oh, MJ,” he heaves and hugs her close, nearly lifting her off of the bed and bowing her body into his like a perfect puzzle piece.

“Don’t go,” she implores him.

In the crook of her neck, he gives, “You can’t fight fate, MJ.”

“Fuck fate, Parker,” the strength of her voice surprises her. He yanks his head out of her neck to look down at her and she cups his cheek. She feels the patches of unshaven hair starting to grow there, lightly rough to the touch, “Isn’t that what we’re good at, anyway?”

She sinks back into the bed when he lets her go and sits up. The blankets slide down his body and pool at his waist. She reaches a hand out to touch the back that faces her and he stiffens. Atlas, she remembers thinking once, he always looks like Atlas with the weight of the world on his plucky shoulders.

“I love you,” he reiterates. Even after a couple of lifetimes of earth shattering love, these words still manage to humble her.

“I know,” she utters back.

He looks over his shoulder at her tucked cozily into his bed with his worn-out blankets strewn over her body, “And do you love me?”

“You know I do.”

“Then.” His voice sounds like a trap, “You have to let me go.”

“Bullshit,” she curses. MJ sits up and brushes his blankets away, reaching hopelessly for her clothes. She hears him sigh from where he is seated on the bed, but she does not stop tugging on her clothes. She can’t stop. Motion is the only thing keeping her together and sane and from the edge of a break-down.

The bed creaks, “MJ-”

“Don’t you fucking MJ me, Peter Parker.”

“What do you want from me?” he asks. “Huh? I didn’t pick this for us. I didn’t shackle us to this curse.”

“Oh,” she laughs without humor, “Are you saying I did?”

“No,” he gripes. “God, every lifetime you’re like this, you know that?”

She throws his shirt in his face and Peter takes the hint and tugs it over his head. “You have no idea what this curse is like for me?”

“Excuse me?” he gapes at her. “Are you serious? I literally die.”

MJ whips him with his jeans as she throws them across the room at his stupid, gigantic head. He flinches but pulls them on. Michelle sits on the edge of his desk and starts to lace up her boots, her eyes welling with angry tears. “You know, Peter.” She faces him and repeats, lower, “You know. Every life. Every life you get to remember the last. And okay, fine, maybe that’s a curse. But its also a gift because you get to remember the laughter…and our first kisses and, fuck, every special moment. But I never do. Ever. And, sure, I fall in love with you all over again…but then you die. And I feel it. And then, once the pain has stopped radiating through every muscle in my freakin’ body, I have to live the rest of my life without you. With more questions than answers. There is no peace for me after you die. Only despair and so many questions.”

He watches her in awe and sadness. She dips her chin to the ground and sees a wet tear drop off the edge of her nose and plop on her shoes, “So, yea, fine, you literally die, but Peter Parker…I challenge you to live a life where I die first and then tell me you’ve been the cursed one.”

“MJ,” he reaches for her.

She shirks her body away, “No. Go fall on your cross, Peter. After all, I’m used to it.”

Michelle wants to feel some kind of victory when she slams his bedroom door closed behind her but all she feels is the ripped out hole of agony in her stomach. She expects for that anguish to eventually give way to some other emotion but it never does.

Her phone buzzes incessantly for the next hour and she’s tempted so many times to answer but she resists the urge. She sees Peter’s name flash on her phone for the tenth time and that’s when she turns it off. MJ doesn’t want to hear his excuses. She deserves better than a half-baked excuse explaining away his borderline suicide mission.

Besides, she doesn’t need to face him dying over the phone. Bitterly, she thinks, she’ll feel it when it happens.  
She knows she’s being reckless. There is a war going on one burrow away. She should be inside, she should be keeping safe, but if is planning to die then what does it matter if she’s safe? It’s a horrible, sickening thought, but she has lived too long to think any other way. Life stops mattering so much when it happens on a loop.

MJ finds refuge on a park bench and tucks her knees into her chest, eyes cast down. She hears the body flop down beside her but she doesn’t bother to look up.

Ned nudges her shoulder, “MJ?” She leans her forehead against her knees.

“MJ,” Ned repeats, “Peter’s tried calling you a dozen times.”

“I know,” she mumbles into the denim of her jeans.

“You know?” he says slowly, “And you’re not gonna call him back?”

“If he’s determined to get himself killed, I can’t stop him.”

Ned tsks, “That’s a load of crap.” Ned softens and puts a steady hand around Michelle’s shoulders. She quickly hides her face in his shoulder and shutters out a breath she’s been holding since leaving the Parker’s apartment. “MJ, he’s scared,” Ned whispers. “He thinks he’s gonna die.”

She can’t help herself, she laughs. Ned gawks at her. She covers her mouth to stop the out pour of laughter. And then, something in her shifts and shatters. She cries for the second time that day in the span of two hours. Once she begins to cry she cannot stop herself from sobbing in earnest. She nudges her nose in between her knees to muffle the sound but it hardly helps.

Ned pulls her against him, “MJ, please, tell me how to help you.”

“I don’t know how to stop it, Ned,” she hiccups back her tears. “It’s a loop, you know? Where does a circle end?”

“I don’t und-”

“It doesn’t,” she talks over him. “It just goes around and around and around. Never ending. Torturing me.”

Ned clears his throat, “Michelle, I don’t know what you’re talking about. But.” And Ned weighs his words. He makes her wait for whatever modicum of wisdom he has to impart on her. She cynically thinks he’s a child with the knowledge of one life time and she is a cursed lover with the experience to know the world is always at war and death is the only end for her story. “-if you accept this, whatever it is you’re talking about, how can it end? You have to be the one to find the courage and stop it.”

She realizes the common thread between each of her lives. MJ rips herself free of Ned’s embrace and stands, her body so wound up with energy that she could not dampen if she tried. She whirls on Ned and kisses his cheek theatrically. “Ned,” she wipes away her tears, “You’re a genius.”

“Thanks?” he blinks.

She has to think quickly. MJ has to find him. There is no time to waste this life. She could already be too late. No, she banishes that thought, she cannot think that way.

MJ begins to flip through her useless catalog of Peter Parker knowledge. She has been observing him for over two years now. There has to be a place he would go before he-

And it hits her.

Peter Parker will not walk feet first into death without saying goodbye. She runs, muscles straining and cold wind whipping at her face, to the last place Peter Parker will go before battle.

Calvary Cemetery in Queens is eerily silent. There are no groundskeepers or mourners in sight. MJ knows people are hiding from Thanos, from the war to end all wars. She realizes she has lived two lifetimes now with two wars to end all wars. There is a poetic symmetry to her lives that she loathes.

Peter is standing, boldly, in his Spider-man suit looking down at Ben Parker’s grave, his mask in hand. She squints and sees him whispering something to his uncle’s grave.

Michelle Jones rages against fate. She batters against the bars of destiny. And steps forward.

“All I have to do,” she approaches him, “is stop you.”

Peter’s shoulders tense and he whirls around to stare at her. She is still wearing the same clothes he had painstakingly took off of her earlier. She sees him take it all in, recording what he thinks will be their last conversation. She cannot accept that so she says, again, “All I have to do is stop you.”

His eyes well in sadness, “MJ-”

Her words make Peter shake, so she repeats them, “All I have to do is stop you.”

“MJ,” he starts, “that’s not how it works.”

“Bullshit,” she says and she can feel the excitement building in her stomach. A flutter of hope, “We don’t know how this works. Peter, think about it, in every life…I let you go. I didn’t stop you from fighting in Egypt or England. I didn’t free you in France or Russia. Every time you died I could have saved you. I can save you.”

“MJ-“

“No,” she interrupts, wildly, “I feel you die. Every single time. It’s agony. And I know, I know in my gut, the reason I feel you die is because I let it happen. It’s my punishment. I failed.”

“I have to go,” he yanks his mask over his face. She will not accept his decision in this life. He is so boorishly stupid– her wonderful boy. She can save him and she will.

MJ takes two long strides and pulls off his mask, “I’m not done talking.”

“Yes, you are.” He tries for his mask but she keeps it from his grasp.

“No,” she says louder. “No,” she repeats softer with feeling, “Let me do it this time.”

“I don’t-” his eyebrows knit.

“Let me go instead,” she explains. His eyes widen in realization. She nods and cups his face in her hands, “Let me do it, baby.”

“You don’t even have,” he fumbles for the right words, “You’re not…you can’t fight Thanos.”

“You have the suit. I’ll use the suit.”

“It doesn’t work like that!” he shouts.

“It works that way for Tony Stark. It can work that way for me, too. That suit has tech I can use. Let me go instead.” He is shaking his head as she nods. She knows this can work, she feels it in her bones. If fate wants to take Spider-Man who says it has to be Peter Parker? Michelle Jones can put on the suit and she can do this for him. He has died for her life after life. Now, its time they shoulder the burden together.

He can see her resolve, she can tell. He grabs her hands on his cheeks and speaks clearly, like the tone of his voice will walk her away from the edge of shared destruction, “MJ. You can’t climb on walls. You can’t…”

“I can swing with the webs. I can use the suit to help me with what I don’t know. I can do this,” she nods, a watery smile gracing her tired features.

“No,” he swallows, “I won’t, I can’t. You can’t ask me to do this. To live without you.”

“That’s what I’ve done every life, Peter. Lived without you. It’s time to switch the script,” she talks gently to him, like addressing a child.

He shakes his head, “No.”

“There is so much life to live, Peter,” she explains. “You wouldn’t know. You never make it past twenty-five. You’ve never had a 30th birthday or had children or grown old. You have never lived. Not in a single life. Dying for love doesn’t make you noble. It just makes you dead. Over and over again.”

“MJ, you can’t,” he swallows down his tears. “I won’t give you the suit.”

“I have to go, Peter.”

“We can’t do this, MJ. They’ll use you to hurt me. No,” he corrects himself, “They’ll kill you and it will devastate me. Thanos and his legion are not going to show us any mercy.”

“Maybe, after everything I’ve done, I don’t deserve mercy.”

“How can you say that?” he grabs her shoulders and crushes her into a hug. They sway at the edge of Ben Parker’s grave. Life and death always intertwined with them. “How can you even think it?”

She wipes a lock of his hair back off of his face. There is so much love in her every last touch, she infuses it so he has some memories he can hold onto after she’s gone. Michelle leans forward and knocks her nose against his, he reluctantly presses their foreheads together. They both close their eyes and breathe together. “Don’t worry,” she whispers, “I’ll find you again.”

“MJ, no-” But the time for talking is over.

MJ gathers all of her strength and throws it into a punch at his temple. Her hand aches from the hit. His eyes widen and then roll back. He collapses on the ground and MJ falls to her knees to cradle his unconscious head.

She kisses between his eyes and whispers, “I love you.”

Michelle steals his suit and armors up for battle.

When she goes online as Spider-man she hears the crackle of a dozen voices shouting in her head. One comes through stronger than the others, “What the hell, Parker? Where are you?”

“Peter can’t come to the phone right now,” MJ weakly jokes.

The whole line goes silent as she shakily starts to web her way downtown. She nearly falls to her death a hundred times, but some AI named Karin always catches her before she falls by instructing her gently on how to websling. She knows whatever voices were on the other end of the line have cut her off, probably fighting and discussing what to do with the person who stole Peter’s suit.

She is terrified but Karin helps.

Finally, the voices filter back into her head and Tony Stark asks, “Where is Peter? Is he okay?”

She decides to be honest, “He’s half-naked, passed out on his uncle’s grave, but beside that…he’s okay.”

“What?” a second voice joins their conversation.

“And who are you?” Tony inquires.

Michelle lands deftly in the middle of the action. Avengers all around her are fighting for their lives. MJ swallows,

“What you’ve got.”

Iron-Man flies around to look at the Spider-Man impostor and inclines his head, “Okay, what-we’ve-got. Web ‘em up.”

She has never been in a battle before. The French Revolution she is not sure counts as war. She was never on the battle lines or in the trenches. She was a spy and marched for her country, but actual war is not something she has ever experienced. It is a sensory overload. Every single scream and shot and building collapse feels like the end of the world. She cannot filter out the noise. It all waves over her in a wash.

Peter could focus. He has done this for several lives. He is a soldier.

He is war and she is love. She is not suited for this ravaged battlefield, but, as she said, she is what they have here, today, and that will have to be enough.

She will make it enough.

MJ shoulders the responsibility she has been running from for over a thousand years, makes her peace and shoots his web.

—

Peter Parker has lived many lives. In each of his lives, he is shackled with the burden of remembering his previous lives and the responsibility of a soldier. He has drenched his hands in blood to protect the innocent. He knows very little goodness save one thing—the woman who wears as many lives as him, Michelle.

When he wakes up at Ben’s grave, he is cold and terrified. His body aches from the scratch of the dirt but he forces himself to stand. He has to know what happened, he has to go and help MJ if he can. It cannot be too late, he prays.  
Stupid, maddening, wonderful woman.

When he finally makes it to his apartment, he is bewildered, eyes searching for a trace of MJ. “Michelle?” he shouts. “MJ!” he slams the front door closed.

Aunt May comes ripping around the corner of their kitchen, her eyes red with tears and chokes out, “Peter?”

“May?” he raises his eyebrow. Aunt May runs across the living room floor and yanks him into a crippling hug, sobbing.

He eyes widen and he softly pats the back of his aunt’s head. She is hysterical. “I didn’t mean,” he whispers, “to scare you. I’m okay.”

“I saw you die,” her back shakes in his arms. “On the news. I saw Thanos kill you.”

His knees give out.

May scrambles to keep him upright but he is falling, falling, falling. He bends over and grips at his hair and screams. He was certain, he was so sure, he would feel it if she died. They were connected. She wasn’t allowed to die. That was his burden. That was his moment. That was his destiny. She was supposed to live, grow old and find him again in the next life.

Dead.

It hits him like a bullet to the chest. She is dead.

“Oh my god,” he suffocates.

“Peter,” May panics. “Baby, breathe.”

“I-I,” he clutches at his chest, “I can’t…I can’t….I can’t breathe.”

“Peter Benjamin Parker, you will breathe for me.”

He does. And his whole world crumbles around him with every breath he takes instead of MJ.

He searches his heart for echoes of her, like a second heartbeat. He starts to hopelessly think that perhaps May is wrong; perhaps May didn’t see what she thought she saw; each hypothetical scenario fleeting comforts him in-between nasty waves of the truth. Michelle Jones is dead. She is dead because of him.

The world is muted colors. The world is a little less without her. His world is nothing.

When May finally gets him off the ground—it takes too long but every time he tries to stand he sees flashes of her laughing face and he collapses—she shows him the video. She gently suggest he does not have to look at it, but he needs to see it. He has to see how she died. He has to know.

It’s horrible. The crude footage off of someone’s phone is not so terrible that he can’t hear the crack. He does. It snaps like a twig. Her swan-like neck that he had peppered with kisses earlier that morning. He wonders if her body still has the marks from him, like a ghostly kiss.

He plays it on a loop. The crack is the only sound he hears for hours.

—

Somewhere across town, Tony Stark pulls off the Spider-Man mask on MJ’s body.

Her head lolls to the side lifelessly and Tony turns his face away. He cannot stand to look. He had hoped, perhaps foolishly, that whoever had donned the suit and mask would have been an adult, but this girl looks no older than seventeen. He isn’t sure how he knows, but this is Peter’s friend. Someone close to him.

He has to leave. He cannot stand to look at her much longer. He flips he lights off and goes.

Her body is mostly in tact. Her neck hangs unnaturally to the side, but she still looks like MJ.

Destiny watches on in despair. Whatever otherworldly power created the loop, now broken, feels no joy at the end. Poetic justice is not the same thing as justice. They deserved to live a soft epilogue, to have the credits of their lives roll without consequence. Instead, all Peter Parker has is the humming tone of her snapping neck playing on repeat across town. That is not soft. That is tragedy personified.

Time, space and grace all convene. There is nothing left to gain from the never-ending circle of Peter and MJ. So they decide to end it.

And, miraculously, MJ breathes.


End file.
